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The next step would be to use metal for bone and stone. So the Eskimos of Davis Strait and some of the Greenlanders show an advance in art by jagging the edge with a row of chips of meteoric iron.[153] This would lead to providing the whole wooden blade with an edge of metal, when the latter was still too rare and too expensive for the whole weapon. This economy might easily have overlapped not only the Bronze, but the Iron Epoch.

The tooth-shaped edge was perpetuated in the Middle Ages, as we see by serrated and pierced blades of Italian daggers. That it is not yet extinct the absurd saw-bayonet of later years proves.

FIRST USE OF METALS.

Fig. 72.—Arab Sword, with Down-curved Guillons and Saw Blade. (Musée d’Artillerie, G. 413, inscription not legible.)

We now reach the time when Man, no longer contented with the baser materials—bone and teeth, horn and wood—learned the use of metals, possibly from an accidental fire, when

... a scrap of stone cast on the flame that lit his den

Gave out the shining ore, and made the Lord of beasts a Lord of men.