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24 attempts were made to harden copper, and to make it better suited for cutting implements by a slight intermixture principally of tin. Hence arose that mixed metal to which the name of 'bronze' has been given, and which, according to the oldest writers of Greece and Rome, was generally used in the southern countries before iron.

That that was the case farther north, and that in Denmark there was once a time,—the so-called bronze-period,—in which weapons and cutting instruments were made of bronze, because the use of iron was either not known at all, or very imperfectly, we learn with certainty from our antiquities. We must not however by any means believe that the bronze-period developed itself among the aborigines, gradually, or step by step, out of the stone-period. On the contrary, instead of the simple and uniform implements and ornaments of stone, bone, and amber, we meet suddenly with a number and variety of splendid weapons, implements, and jewels of bronze, and sometimes indeed with jewels of gold. The transition is so abrupt, that from the antiquities we are enabled to conclude, what in the following pages will be further developed, that the bronze-period must have commenced with the irruption of a new race of people, possessing a higher degree of cultivation than the early inhabitants.

As bronze tools and weapons spread over the land, the ancient and inferior implements of stone and bone were, as a natural consequence, superseded. This change however was by no means so rapid as to enable us to maintain with certainty, that from the beginning of the bronze-period, no stone implements were used in Denmark. The universal diffusion of metals could only take place by degrees. Since in Denmark itself, neither copper nor tin occurs, so that these metals, being introduced from other countries, were, of necessity, expensive, the poorer classes continued for a long series of years to make use of stone as their material; but it also appears that the richer, at all events in the earlier periods, in addition to their bronze implements, still used others of stone,