The great majority of metallic objects is of bronze, which
necessitated the employment of tin, and this could not be obtained
except by commerce, inasmuch as it is a stranger to the Alps. It would
appear, therefore, more natural to admit that the art of combining tin
with copper--in other words, that the manufacture of bronze--was of
foreign importation." He then shows that, although copper ores are found
in the Alps, the probability is that even "the copper also was of
foreign importation. Now, in view of the prodigious quantity of bronze
manufactured at that epoch, this single branch of commerce must itself
have necessitated the most incessant commercial communications."
And as this commerce could not, as we have seen, have been carried on by
the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, or Phoenicians, because their
civilizations flourished during the Iron Age, to which this age of
bronze was anterior, where then are we to look for a great maritime and
commercial people, who carried vast quantities of copper, tin, and
bronze (unalloyed by the lead of the south of Europe) to Denmark,
Norway, Sweden, Ireland, England, France, Spain, Switzerland, and Italy?
Where can we find them save in that people of Atlantis, whose ships,
docks, canals, and commerce provoked the astonishment of the ancient
Egyptians, as recorded by Plato.
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