Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/217

Rh made out. All that we know certainty is that gold, silver, copper, tin, and bronze had there intruded themselves among the implements and ornaments of worked stone, though they had scarcely made an approach to driving them out of use, and that the traditions of both continents ascribed their higher culture to certain foreigners who were looked upon as supernatural beings. If we reason upon the supposition that these remarkably unanimous legends may perhaps contain historical, in combination with mythical elements, the question suggests itself, where, for a thousand or fifteen hundred years before the Spanish discovery, were men to be found who could teach the Mexicans and Peruvians to make bronze, and could not teach them to smelt and work iron? The people of Asia seem the only men on whose behalf such a claim can be sustained at all. The Massagetæ of Central Asia were in the Bronze Age in the time of Herodotus, who, describing their use of bronze for spear and arrow-heads, battle-axes, and other things, and of gold rather for ornamental purposes, remarks that they make no use of iron or silver, for they have none in their country, while gold and bronze abound. Four centuries later, Strabo modifies this remark, saying that they have no silver, little iron, but abundance of gold and bronze. The Tatars were in the Iron Age when visited by mediæval travellers, and the history of the transition from bronze to iron in Central Asia, of which we seem to have here a glimpse, is for the most part obscure. The matter is, however, the more worthy of remark from its bearing on the argument for the connexion of the culture of Mexico and that of Asia, grounded by Humboldt on the similarities in the mythology and the calendar of the two districts.

If we now turn to the history of the Stone Age in Asia, Africa, and Europe, we shall indeed find almost everywhere evidence of a Stone Period, which preceded a Bronze or Iron Period, but this is only to be had in small part from the direct inspection of races living without metal implements. The Kamchadals of north-eastern Asia, a race as yet ethnologically isolated, were found by the Kosak invaders using cutting-tools of stone and bone. It is recorded that with these instruments it took them