History
The nature of metals has fascinated mankind for many centuries, because these materials provided people with tools of unsurpassed properties both in war and in their preparation and processing.
Sterling gold and silver are known to man since the Stone Age. Lead and silver were molten down from ores since the fourth millennium BC.
Read more about this topic: Metallic Elements
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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This book or that, come to this hallowed place
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Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
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—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)