It was only when implements of metal had been invented that it was possible to practise the art of agriculture with any considerable success.

Then tribes would cease from their wanderings, and begin to form settlements, homesteads, villages, and towns.

An old Scandinavian legend thus curiously illustrates this last period:--There was a giantess whose daughter one day saw a husbandman ploughing in the field.

She ran and picked him up with her finger and thumb, put him and his plough and oxen into her apron, and carried them to her mother, saying, "Mother, what sort of beetle is this that I have found wriggling in the sand ?" But the mother said, "Put it away, my child; we must begone out of this land, for these people will dwell in it." M.Worsaae of Copenhagen, who has been followed by other antiquaries, has even gone so far as to divide the natural history of civilization into three epochs, according to the character of the tools used in each.

The first was the Stone period, in which the implements chiefly used were sticks, bones, stones, and flints.