Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT. 19 CHAPTER III. WORK AND PROGRESS. THE discovery of bronze in a grave, which contains the traces of great antiquity, may be regarded as an epoch-making event in the history of a country. It furnishes convincing evidence of work and progress. While development is apparent in the more skilfully constructed instruments of the Later Stone Age as compared with the Earlier, it becomes a predominant feature as soon as we find the presence of a metal like bronze. It represents a revolution in society which, though lost to history, must have been fraught with important results. It means for one thing a certain advance in material comfort. The workman furnished with a bronze axe was far more the master of circumstances than he who only possessed one of stone. It means also a corresponding development in the habits of life. The use of his implements and weapons would keep the man, who was acquainted with the manufacture of bronze, from remaining a savage. They would lend him a means of helping himself, which must speedily transform his whole life, giving him a better chance of clearing the forest, of tilling the ground, of providing shelter for himself and his dependants, of defending his home from the attacks of wild beasts, and of securing a richer diet than was possible before. It means, further, an impulse to trade and intercourse, an advance from the mere nomadic state to at least the rudiments of an industrial life—the exchange of manufactured articles and the spirit of enterprise which this includes. It means, too, the growth of intelligence. The education of the human race in its lower stages must depend largely on such tangible objects as men use in the ordinary work of life. These furnish an object-lesson, where thinking, without the aid of things that...