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Wilde also notices, in the Royal Irish Academy, weapons, tools, and ornaments of red metal or pure copper. These are thirty celts of the greatest simplicity and the earliest pattern, rudely formed tools, a few fibulæ, a trumpet, two battle-axes, and several Sword-blades of the short, broad, and curved shape usually called scythes.

Fig. 77.—Copper Celts in the Dublin Collection.

The pure copper celts, formed upon two or three types, are the oldest in the Dublin collection, and were probably the immediate successors of the stone implement. As a rule they have one side smoother than the other, as if they had been run into simple stone moulds; they are also thicker and of rougher surface than the bronze article. For the most part they are rude and unornamented wedges of cast metal: a few are lunette-shaped and semilunar blades. The cleansed specimens show a great variety of colour. When first found, the brown crust, peculiar to the oxidised metal, readily distinguishes them from the bronze patina, the beautiful varnish of æruginous or verdigris hue, artificial malachite resembling in colour the true native carbonate of copper.