Perhaps it should be stated here that the copper, so often mentioned in
The Kalevala, when taken literally, was probably bronze, or "hardened
copper," the amount and quality of the alloy used being not now known.
The prehistoric races of Europe were acquainted with bronze implements.

It may be interesting to note in this connection that Canon Isaac
Taylor, and Professor Sayce have but very recently awakened great
interest in this question, in Europe especially, by the reading of
papers before the British Philological Association, in which they argue
in favor of the Finnic origin of the Aryans. For this new theory these
scholars present exceedingly strong evidence, and they conclude that
the time of the separation of the Aryan from the Finnic stock must have
been more than five thousand years ago.

The Finnish nation has one of the most sonorous and flexible of
languages. Of the cultivated tongues of Europe, the Magyar, or
Hungarian, bears the most positive signs of a deep-rooted similarity to
the Finnish. Both belong to the Ugrian stock of agglutinative
languages, i.e., those which preserve the root most carefully, and
effect all changes of grammar by suffixes attached to the original
stein. Grimin has shown that both Gothic and Icelandic present traces
of Finnish influence.

The musical element of a language, the vowels, are well developed in
Finnish, and their due sequence is subject to strict rules of euphony.
The dotted o; (equivalent to the French eu) of the first syllable must
be followed by an e or an i. The Finnish, like all Ugrian tongues,
admits rhyme, but with reluctance, and prefers alliteration. Their
alphabet consists of but nineteen letters, and of these, b, c, d, f, g,