Now, to apply this reasoning to the origin of weapons. The only vestiges of the primaeval tools of mankind now left to us are those constructed of stone; others of the more perishable materials have decayed, and their representatives only have remained in some few cases as survivals. In my last lecture I showed how uniform in shape and in development these stone implements are found to be in all parts of the world, whether derived from the northern or southern continent of America, from Siberia, Australia, India, Africa, or the surface soils and river gravels of Europe. This uniformity of shape has been used as an argument that mankind must have independently designed the same forms of tools in various parts of the world, and that under like conditions, like forms will be produced by men, however remotely separated. I am not prepared to deny the possibility of some of these forms having had an independent origin; but if the proof of it is to be based upon the separation of continents, we see how entirely groundless such an argument is when applied to the earliest ages of humanity. For if, as has been conjectured, the races of man may have been dispersed by geographical changes of land and sea, it is obvious they may have carried with them, from some primal source, the art of manufacturing stone weapons; the resemblance of which is far more satisfactorily accounted for by this means[187] than by supposing such singular and invariable coincidence in design to be the result of independent discovery. As we contemplate man in his lower and lowest conditions, we find the imitative faculty stands out more and more prominently by the absence of those higher qualities which characterize civilized races; and whatever power of originality for the invention of new arts may have been possessed by the earliest inhabitants of the globe, its results appear to have been spread over so vast a lapse of time that it can scarcely be accounted at all as an element in the mental attributes of primaeval man.
I now pass to what has been announced as the subject proper of my present communication, viz. the origin and development of metal tools. I use the word _metal_ intentionally, in preference to specifying bronze, because, although we have good reason for supposing that in Europe, Egypt, Assyria, and the central parts of America, bronze preceded iron as a material for weapons, it is not so certain that this was the case in all parts of Asia; and in Africa we know that iron was the first metal employed by the negroes.