Bronze Age antiquities. Because nature moves by steady progression and
develops on even lines--_nihil facit per sal-tum_--it seems to have been
assumed that the works of man's hands have developed in the same way,
in a regular and even scheme all over the world. On this supposition it
would be impossible for the great discovery of the use of iron to have
been known in Egypt as early as 3500 B.C. for this knowledge to have
remained dormant there for two thousand years, and then to have
been suddenly communicated about 1000 B.C. to Greece, spreading with
lightning-like rapidity over Europe and displacing the use of bronze
everywhere. Yet, as a matter of fact, the work of man does develop
in exactly this haphazard way, by fits and starts and sudden leaps of
progress after millennia of stagnation. Throwsback to barbarism are just
as frequent. The analogy of natural evolution is completely inapplicable
and misleading.

Prof. Montelius, however, following the "evolutionary" line of thought,
believed that because iron was not known in Europe till about 1000 B.C.
it could not have been known in Egypt much earlier; and in an important
article which appeared in the Swedish ethnological journal _Ymer_ in
1883, entitled _Bronsaldrn i Egypten_ ("The Bronze Age in Egypt"), he
essayed to prove the contrary arguments of the Egyptologists wrong. His
main points were that the colour of the weapons in the frescoes was of
no importance, as it was purely conventional and arbitrary, and that the
evidence of the piece of iron from the Great Pyramid was insufficiently
authenticated, and therefore valueless, in the absence of other definite
archaeological evidence in the shape of iron of supposed early date. To
this article the Swedish Egyptologist, Dr. Piehl, replied in the same
periodical, in an article entitled _Bronsaldem i Egypten_, in which he
traversed Prof. Montelius's conclusions from the Egyptological point of
view, and adduced other instances of the use of iron in Egypt, all,