people were and where they dwelt.

In the first place, it was observed that the age of bronze (a compound
of copper and tin) must, in the natural order of things, have been
preceded by an age when copper and tin were used separately, before the
ancient metallurgists had discovered the art of combining them, and yet
in Europe the remains of no such age have been found. Sir John Lubbock
says ("Prehistoric Times," p. 59), "The absence of implements made
either of copper or tin seems to me to indicate that the art of making
bronze was introduced into, not invented in, Europe." The absence of
articles of copper is especially marked, nearly all the European
specimens of copper implements have been found in Ireland; and yet out
of twelve hundred and eighty-three articles of the Bronze Age, in the
great museum at Dublin, only thirty celts and one sword-blade are said
to be made of pure copper; and even as to some of these there seems to
be a question.

Where on the face of the earth are we to find a Copper Age? Is it in the
barbaric depths of that Asia out of whose uncivilized tribes all
civilization is said to have issued? By no means. Again we are compelled
to turn to the West. In America, from Bolivia to Lake Superior, we find
everywhere the traces of a long-enduring Copper Age; bronze existed, it
is true, in Mexico, but it held the same relation to the copper as the
copper held to the bronze in Europe--it was the exception as against the
rule. And among the Chippeways of the shores of Lake Superior, and among
them alone, we find any traditions of the origin of the manufacture of
copper implements; and on the shores of that lake we find pure copper,
out of which the first metal tools were probably hammered before man had
learned to reduce the ore or run the metal into moulds. And on the
shores of this same American lake we find the ancient mines from which