founding his contention on the scarcity of tin, the difficulty of
obtaining alloys, and on the sixty-one iron foundries of Switzerland
which may date from prehistoric times. The rarity of the discovery of
iron objects, he urged, is accounted for by the ease with which such
objects are destroyed by rust. There has never been a Bronze or an
Iron age in America, so that it would seem very doubtful whether all
races went through the same cycles of development. I myself prefer
the division into the PALAEOLITHIC period, when men only used roughly
chipped stones, and the NEOLITHIC period, when they carefully polished
their stone weapons. "There may," says Alexander Bertrand,[28] "be one
immutable law for the succession of strata throughout the entire crust
of the earth, but there is no corresponding law applicable to human
agglomerations or to the succession of the strata of civilization. It
would be a very grave error to adopt the theory according to which
all human races have passed through the same phases of development
and have gone through the same complete series of social conditions."


FIGURE 2

Copper hatchets found in Hungary, and now in the National Museum
of Budapest.


It may perhaps be convenient to introduce a fourth period when copper
alone was used and our ancestors were still ignorant of the alloys
necessary for the production of bronze. Hesiod speaks of a third
generation of men as possessing copper only, and although it does not
do to attach undue importance to isolated facts, recent discoveries in
the Cevennes, in Spain, in Hungary, and elsewhere, appear to confirm