John S. Hittell
Published: 2016-09-27
Total Pages: 392
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Excerpt from A History of the Mental Growth of Mankind in Ancient Times, Vol. 2: Heathen Barbarism In the course of ages, when men learned to make fires hot enough, they discovered the fusibility of copper and its ores. Then they found that by mixing it with tin, they obtained an alloy which possessed the combination of hardness with elasticity, needed for knives, chisels, axes, swords, awls, hoes, and Sickles. Bronze gave a highly-increased efficiency to their toil in many directions. It supplied facilities, previously unapproached, for dig ging up the soil, chopping down trees, Shaping wood, and quarrying and cutting stone. By stimulating tillage, it increased the supply of food and made population more dense. It enabled men to build houses of cut-stone; it Cheapened the construction of boats. It improved arms and military discipline. It elevated men from savagism to barbarism. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.