The late Mr. James Fergusson, in his Rude Stone Monuments,[1] has analyzed the discoveries made by Bateman in his exploration of Derbyshire barrows, and on the analysis has founded an argument against the division of time into the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. He has, however, omitted to take into account the fact that in many of the barrows there were secondary interments of a date long subsequent to the primary.
I have spoken of this division into Periods as having been first practically adopted by the Danish school of antiquaries, but in fact this classification is by no means so recent as has been commonly supposed. Take, for instance, the communication of Mahudel to the Académie des Inscriptions of Paris[2] in 1734, in which he points out that man existed a long time in different countries using implements of stone and without any knowledge of metals; or again, the following passage from Bishop Lyttelton's[3] "Observations on Stone Hatchets," written in 1766:—"There is not the least doubt of these stone instruments having been fabricated in the earliest times, and by barbarous people, before the use of iron or other metals was known, and from the same cause spears and arrows were headed with flint and other hard stones." A century earlier, Sir William Dugdale, in his "History of Warwickshire,"[4] also speaks of stone celts as "weapons used by the Britons before the art of making arms of brass or iron was known." We find, in fact, that the same views were entertained, not only by various writers[5] within the last two centuries, but also by many of the early poets and historians. There are even biblical grounds for argument in favour of such a view of a gradual development of material civilization. For all, including those who invest Adam with high moral attributes, must confess that whatever may have been his mental condition, his personal equipment in the way of tools or weapons could have been but inefficient if no artificer was instructed in brass and iron until the days of Tubal Cain, the sixth in descent from Adam's outcast son, and that too at a time when a generation was reckoned at a hundred years, instead of at thirty, as now.
- ↑ 1872, p. 11, et seqq.
- ↑ Mém., vol. xii., 163.
- ↑ Archæologia, vol. ii. p. 118.
- ↑ p. 778.
- ↑ I would especially refer to an excellent article by the Rev. John Hodgson in Vol. I. of the Archæologia Æliana (A.D. 1816), entitled "An inquiry into the æra when brass was used in purposes to which iron is now applied."
possibility of abnormal variations from it will be found in a lecture to the Archæological Institute delivered by the late Mr. E. T. Stevens in 1872. (Arch. Journ., vol. xxix., p. 393.)
