The Bronze Axe - Page 2

Sinologist gives us a date for anything Chinese, it behoves the rest of the unlearned world to open its mouth and shut its eyes, and thankfully receive whatever the distinguished Sinologist may send it.

In the seventh century, then, these mercantile axes, made in the strictest sense to sell and not to use, were stamped with an official stamp to mark their amount, and became thereby converted into true coins--that was the root of the 'root of all evil.' Thence the declension to the 'cash' is easy; the form grew gradually more and more regular, while the square hole in the centre, once used for the handle, was retained by conservatism and practical sense as a convenient means of stringing them together.

So this was the end of the old bronze hatchet, perhaps the most wonderful civilizing agent ever invented by human ingenuity. Let us hark back now, and from the opposite side see what was its first beginning.

'But why,' you ask, 'the most wonderful civilizing agency? What did the bronze axe ever do for humanity?' Well, nearly everything. I believe I have really not said too much. We are apt to talk big nowadays about the steam-engine, and that marvellous electricity which is always going to do wonders for us all--to-morrow; but I don't know whether either ever produced so great a revolution in human life, or so completely metamorphosed human existence, as that simple and commonplace bronze hatchet.

For, consider that before the days of bronze man knew no weapon or implement of any sort save the stone axe, or tomahawk, and the flint-tipped arrow. Consider, that the highest stage of human culture he had then reached was hardly higher than that of the scalp-hunting Red Indian or the seal-spearing Esquimaux. Consider, that in his Stone Age agriculture and grains were almost unknown--the forest uncleared, the soil untilled, and hunting and fishing the sole or principal human activities. It was the bronze axe that first enabled man to make clearings in the woodland on the large scale, and to sow on those clearings in good big fields the wheat and barley which determined the first great upward step in the drama of civilization. All these things depend in ultimate analysis upon that pioneer of culture, the bronze hatchet.

And how did the first Watt or Edison of metallurgy come to make that earliest bronze implement? Well, it seems probable that between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age there intervened everywhere, or nearly everywhere, a very short and transient age of copper. And the reason for thus thinking is threefold. In the first place, bronze is an alloy of tin and copper: and it seems natural to suppose that men would use the simple metals in isolation to begin with, before they discovered that they could harden and temper them by mixing the two together. In the second place, copper occurs in the pure or native state (without the trouble of smelting) in several countries, and was therefore a very