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Rh to any one people, but have been used by the most different nations, at the same stage of civilization; and there is no historical evidence strong enough to prove that the Teutonic people were in that respect an exception. The forms and patterns of the various weapons, implements, and ornaments are so much alike, because such forms and patterns are the most natural, and the most simple. As we saw in the stone-period, how people at the lowest stage of civilization, by a sort of instinct, made their stone implements in the same shape, so we see now in the first traces of a higher civilization, that they exhibit in the mode of working objects of bronze, a similar general resemblance. But it is quite clear that the civilization in the bronze-period was only preparatory. It principally existed as long as the people spread themselves over the countries, cutting down woods, and beginning to cultivate the soil; in short, so long as they did not appear actively on the stage of history. At the moment they did so appear, we find them in possession of iron, and of the higher civilization which went along with it. Already in the time of Homer the Greeks had iron, although it was very scarce and expensive; the Romans seem to have had, and used iron, before the kings were expelled. It was partly an effect of Greek and Roman influence, that the use of iron was known at a comparatively early period in the northern parts of Italy, in South Germany, and Gallia, the inhabitants of which countries were thereby enabled to contend so gallantly with the Romans. Polybius mentions however, that the Gauls, who about two hundred years before Christ, fought against the Romans in the north of Italy, were obliged in their battles to straighten their swords by putting their feet upon them, because they bent when exposed to a heavy blow; a fact which shews that the Gauls did not then possess steel. The invention of making the iron hard is attributed to the Celts of Noricum; in the time of Augustus, the Noric swords were famous in Rome.

But if the people in the neighbourhood of Rome, and influenced by Roman civilization, at the commencement of the