[Industrial Biography by Samuel Smiles]@TWC D-Link bookIndustrial Biography CHAPTER I 9/39
The potter's wheel had been introduced.
Agriculture had begun, and wild animals had given place to tame ones.
The abundance of bronze also shows that commerce must have existed to a certain extent; for tin, which enters into its composition, is a comparatively rare metal, and must necessarily have been imported from other European countries. The Swiss antiquarians are of opinion that the men of bronze suddenly invaded and extirpated the men of flint; and that at some still later period, another stronger and more skilful race, supposed to have been Celts from Gaul, came armed with iron weapons, to whom the men of bronze succumbed, or with whom, more probably, they gradually intermingled.
When iron, or rather steel, came into use, its superiority in affording a cutting edge was so decisive that it seems to have supplanted bronze almost at once;[4] the latter metal continuing to be employed only for the purpose of making scabbards or sword-handles.
Shortly after the commencement of the iron age, the lake-habitations were abandoned, the only settlement of this later epoch yet discovered being that at Tene, on Lake Neufchatel: and it is a remarkable circumstance, showing the great antiquity of the lake-dwellings, that they are not mentioned by any of the Roman historians. That iron should have been one of the last of the metals to come into general use, is partly accounted for by the circumstance that iron, though one of the most generally diffused of minerals, never presents itself in a natural state, except in meteorites; and that to recognise its ores, and then to separate the metal from its matrix, demands the exercise of no small amount of observation and invention.
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