Irish 'scjan '') looks like a little model of a metal cut-and-thrust blade (fig. 27). Equally interesting is the knife-blade (fig. 29) found with many other specimens of manufactured bone in the Ballinderry 'Crannog'' (county Westmeath): the total length is eight inches, and the handle is highly decorated. Other bone knives are mentioned in the 'Catalogue' (pp. 262-63). Bone prepared for making handles, and even ferules, for Swords and daggers is also referred to (p. 267): the material, being easily worked and tolerably durable, has, indeed, never fallen into disuse. In the shape of ivory,3 walrus-tusk, and hippopotamus-tooth it is an article of luxury extensively used in the present day for the hafts of weapons and domestic implements. Lastly, bone served as a base to carry mere trenchant substances. The museum of Professor Sven Nilsson shows (fig. 31) a smooth, sharp-pointed splinter, some six inches long, grooved in each side to about a quarter of an inch deep. In each of these grooves, fixed by means of cement, was a row of sharpedged and slightly curved bits of flint. A similar implement (fig. 30) is represented in the illustrated catalogue of the Museum of Copenhagen. Of this contrivance I shall speak at length when treating of the wooden Sword.5

While bone was extensively used by primitive Man, horn was the succedaneum in places where it was plentiful. The Swiss lake-dwellings have yielded stag's horn and wooden hafts or helves, with bored holes and sockets; borers, awls or drills; mullers, rubbers, and various other instruments. The caverns of the Reindeer period in the south of France are not less rich. Stag-horn axes are common in Scandinavia, and one preserved by the Stockholm Museum bears the spirited outline of a deer. Beads, buttons, and other ornaments are found in England. This material, when taken from the old stag, is of greater density than osseous matter and of almost stony hardness, as the cancellated structure contains carbonate of lime; morcover it was easily worked by fire and steam.

Diodorus (iii. cap. 15) describes the Ichthyophagi as using antelopes' horns in their fishing, for need teacheth all things.' The earliest mention of a horn-arm is by Homer (Iliad,' ii. 827, and iv. 105), who describes Pandarus, the Lycian, son of Lycaon, using a bow made of the six-spans-long spoils of the nimble

to jingle with their silver catella (chains), and their belts with the plates of silver (baltea laminis crepitant) that inlay them.' It will be seen that Divus Cæsar had juster and more soldier-like views. Scipio the younger, when shown a fine shield by a youth, said: 'It is really beautiful; but a soldier should rely more on his right arm than on his left arm.'

Of Lund, Sweden. The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia, &c., translated by Sir John Lubbock. Nilsson is quoted and illustrated by Col. A. Lane Fox (Prim. War. p. 135), and by Wilde (p. 254) from the Scandinaviska Nordens Ur-Invanare, 1843. 5 Chapter III.

A commentator volunteers the information that the bow was tipped with ram's-horn. Nor is there any need to translate 'goat' by ibex.

mountain-goat.' The weapon may have retained the original form. The early Greek types were either simple or composite. The Persians' preferred, and till lately used, wood and horn, stained, varnished, and adorned as much as possible. Duarte Barbosa 2 describes the Turkish bow at Hormuz Island as 'made of buffalo-horn and stiff wood painted with gold and very pretty colours.' The 'Hornboge' occurs in the 'Nibelungenlied,' and the Hungarians appeared in Europe with horn-bows and poisoned arrows.

The bows of the Sioux and Yutahs are of horn, backed with a strip of raw hide to increase the spring. The Blackfoot bow is made from the horn of the mountain-sheep (Catlin), and the Shoshone of the Rocky Mountains shape it by heating and wetting the horn, which is combined with wood (Schoolcraft). The Eskimos of Polar America, where nothing but drift-timber is procurable, are compelled to build their weapons with several bits of wood, horn, and bone, bent into form by smoking or steaming.

Admirable bows of buffalo-horn-small, but throwing far, and strong-are still made in the Indus-valley about Multan. For this use the horns are cut, scraped, thinned to increase elasticity; joined at the bases by wooden splints, pegs, or nails, and made to adhere by glue and sinews. Man would soon learn to sharpen his wooden shafts with horn-points, the spoils of his prey. Hence the ancient Egyptians applied horn to their light arrows of reed.3 The Christy collection contains an arrow from South America (?) armed with a pile of deer-horn. The Melville Peninsula, being scant of materials, uses as arrow-piles the horns of a musk-ox (ovibos, more ovis than bos), and the thinned defences of the reindeer strengthened by sinews. Antelope-horns are still used as lance-points by the Nubians, the Shilluks, and the Denkas of the Upper Nile; by the Jibbus of Central Africa, and by the tribes of the southern continent. The Bantu' or Kafir races, Zulus and others, make their kiri (kerry) either of wood or of rhinoceros-horn. It varies from a foot to a yard long, and is capped by a knob as large as a hen's egg or a man's fist: hence it is called 'knob-stick' or 'throwstick.' The Ga-ne-u-ga-o-dus-ha (deer-horn war-club) of the Iroquois ended in a point of about four inches long; since the people had intercourse with Europeans they have learned to substitute metal. The form suggests that the martel-de-fer of Persia and India, used by Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was derived from a weapon of this kind: suitable points for arming it have been found in England and Ireland. The Dublin Museum (case 21, Petrie) contains an antler of the red deer converted into a thrusting weapon. The Jumbiyah (crooked

1 Pemberton, Travels.

2 Hakluyt's edit., p. 43. The index to this publication is very defective: one must look through the whole volume for a line of quotation. I shall again notice it in the next chapter.

Wilkinson (Sir J. Gardner), A Fopular Account

of the Ancient Egyptians, i. chap. 5, mentions only tips of hard wood, flint, and metals.

The Roteiro or Ruttier of the Voyage of Vasco da Gama (p. 5, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional) speaks of tribes about the Cape of Good Hope armed with horn weapons worked by fire' (huuns cornos tostados). I should suggest that cornos' is an error for paos (wooden staves).

dagger) of the Arabs, the Khanjar1 of Persia and India, whence the Iberian Alfânge (El-Khanjar) and our silly 'hanger,' shows by form and point that it was originally the half of a buffalo-horn split longitudinally. The modern weapon, with metal blade and ivory handle, has one side of the latter flat, betraying its origin by retaining a peculiarity no longer required. The same is the case when the whole Jumbiyah is, as often happens, made of metal 2 (fig. 6, p. 10).

The sufficiency of horn for the slender wants of uncivilised communities was admirably illustrated by the discovery of a Pfahlbau, or crannog, some three miles south of Laibach, the capital of Carniola, and a little north of the Brunnsdorf village. The site is a low mountain-girt basin, formerly a lake or broad of the Lai-cum-Sava river, and still flooded after heavy rains. Surfacefinds were picked up in 1854-55, and regular explorations began in July 1875.3 During that year two hundred articles were dug up. The material was chiefly stag-horn, tines, and beams, the latter often cut at the burr or antler-crown. The chief objects-many of them artistic as those of the French Reindeer epoch'-were hatchets, hammers, needles, spindles, and punches of horn and split bone; fishhooks, pincers, and skin-scrapers of hog's tusks; with ornaments set in bone, and teeth bored for stringing. Many of these articles showed signs of the saw-kerf or notch which had probably been cut with sanded fibre acting like a file. There were harpoon-heads of peculiar shape, supposed to be unpierced whistles, the hole not having been bored through: evidently they were made to 'unship' when striking the Welsen (Siluri) of the old lake, some of which must have been

The khanjar proper is shaped like a yataghan,

of which more presently.

2 I avoid treating of armour in a book devoted to the Sword; but the Horn Age compels me to show, in a few words, how that material, combined with hoofs, gave rise to scale armour. Pausanias, confirmed by Tacitus, informs us that the Sarmatians (Slavs) prepared the horse-hoofs of their large herds and sewed them with nerves and sinews to overlap like the surface of a fir-cone. He adds that this lorica was not inferior in strength or in elegance to the metal-work of the Greeks. The Emperor Domitian wore a corslet of boars'-hoofs stitched together; and a fragment of such horn-armour was found at Pompeii. Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Sarmatians and the Quadi as protected by loricas of horn-flakes planed, polished, and fastened like feathers upon a linen sheet. A defence composed of the hoofs of some animal, made to hold together without the aid of an inner jerkin, and used in some parts of Asia, is represented in Meyrick (plate iii.). A stone figure of old type similarly defended, and bearing an inscription in a dialect cognate with Greek, appears in vol. iii. Journ. Archeol. Assoc. Herodotus (vii. 76) tells us of a people, whose name has disappeared, that, in

FIG. 32. HARPOON HEAD.

addition to their brazen helmets, they wore the ears and horns of an ox in brass. This horn-helmet shows the savage practice of defending the head with the skins of beasts and their appendages.

The Pfahlbauten im Laibacher Moraste were first noticed in the Neue Freie Presse, August 27, 1875; secondly, by the Neue Deutsche Alpenzeitung, of Vienna, Sept. 4, 1875; thirdly, by Herr Custos Deschmann (to whom the discovery is attributed) in his paper Die Pfahlbauten auf dem Laibacher Moore (Verhand. der Wiener K. K. Geolog. Reichsanstalt, Nov. 16, 1875); and, fourthly, by Carl Freiherr von Czoernig, whose study (Ueber die Vorhistorischen Funde im Laibacher Torfmoor) was read at the Alpine Society of Trieste on December 8, 1875. Between that time and 1880 the subject has been illustrated by many writers. The course of discovery also has been forwards;' and the whole moor was about to be drained in 1881.

Perhaps this may explain the 'pierced implements of unknown use' found with harpoon-heads of reindeer-horn in a cavern near Bruniguel, France. Two picks made of reindeer-antlers were produced by the Grimes Graves,' Westing Parish, Norfolk.

six feet long. The wooden foreshaft, joined by a string to its head, acted as float, and betrayed the position of the prey. This is the third stage of the harpoon: the first would be merely a heavy, pointed stick, and the second a spear with barbs. There were six horn Dolche (daggers), and one peculiar article, an edge of polished stone set in a horn-handle: the latter shows at once the abundance of game, and the value and rarity of the mineral, which probably belonged only to the rich. The eight stone implements were of paleolithic type; the few metal articles-a leaf-shaped sword-blade, a rude knife, lance-heads, arrow-piles, needles, and bodkins—were chiefly copper, five only being bronze; and the pottery corresponds with that of the neolithic period in the museums of Copenhagen and Stockholm. Thus the find, like several in Switzerland, showed a great preponderance of horns, bones, and teeth during a transitional age when the rest of Europe was using polished stone and metal.1

Prehistoric finds are still common in the Laibacher moorground (1882). Lauerza, a hamlet on the edge of the swamp, supplied (Nov. 7) a large stone-axe (Steinbeil), pierced and polished, of the quartzose conglomerate common in the adjacent highlands. This article was exceptional, most of the stone implements being palæolithic. At Aussergoritz appeared remnants of pottery and Roman tiles, a broken hairpin of bronze, a spear of Roman type, and a 'palstab,'' also of bronze: the latter is the normal chisel-shaped hatchet with the flanges turned over for fitting to the handle; it measures 165 cent. long by 3.5 of diameter at the lower part. The sands of Grosscup also yielded sundry fine bronze armlets of Etruscan make found upon embedded skeletons. All the finds have been deposited in the Provincial Museum at Laibach.

The use of horn, like that of bone, has survived to the present day, and still appears in the handles of knives, daggers, and swords. It is of many varieties, and it fetches different prices according to the texture, the markings, and other minutiæ known to the trade.3

The animal remains were of bears, wolves, lynxes, beavers, badgers (probably the cave species), hogs, goats, sheep (differing in the jaw-bone from ovis), dogs (common, and not eaten), and cattle with small teeth like those of the aurochs. The bird-bones resembled those of the common duck. Man was rare, suggesting that the pile-villagers buried on the adjacent slopes; the only human 'find' was an inferior maxilla with teeth much worn.

2 The word paalstab, palstab, or palstave is usually translated labouring-staff,' from at pula or pala, to labour, labourer. Dr. John Evans (Bronzes, &c., p. 72) prefers spade-staff,' the verb being at

pala, to dig, and the noun pall, a spade, spud, shovel; the Latin pala, the French pelle, and our (baker's) peel, or wooden shovel. He confines the term 'palstave' to two forms; the first is the winged celt with the lateral extensions hammered to make a socket; the second is the spud-shaped form, with a thinner blade above than below the side-flanges.

M. Kugelmann, of Hamburg-a wholesale merchant, who kindly showed me his warehouse-prefers the horns of the North American and Japanese stag, especially when buttons are to be made of the

crown.

31

CHAPTER III.

THE WEAPONS OF THE AGE OF WOOD: THE BOOMERANG AND THE SWORD OF WOOD; OF STONE, AND OF WOOD AND STONE COMBINED

The Sword of Wood.

THE 'Age of Wood' began early, lasted long, and ended late. As the practice of savages shows, the spear was originally a pointed stick hardened in the fire; and arrows, the diminutives of the spear, as daggers are of the Sword, were tipped with splinters of bamboo, whose Tabáshir or silicious bark acted like stone. The Peruvians, even after they could beat out plates of gold and silver, fought with pikes having no iron tips, but with the points hardened in the fire.' The same was the case with the Australians,2 who, according to Mr. Howard Spensley,3 also fashioned Swords of very hard wood: the Arabs of the Tihámat or Lowlands of Hazramaut (the Biblical Hazramaveth) are still compelled by poverty to use spears without metal. I pass over the general use of this world-wide material to the epoch when it afforded a true Sword.

The wooden Sword, as we see from its wide dispersion, must have arisen spontaneously among the peoples who had reached that stage of civilisation where it became necessary. These weapons were found in the hands of the Indians of Virginia by the well-known Captain John Smith. Writing in 1606, Oldfield describes swords of heavy black wood in the Sandwich Islands, and Captain Owen Stansley in New Guinea. Mr. Consul Hutchinson notes the wooden swords used by the South American Itonanamas, a sub-tribe of the Maxos. Those preserved in Ireland and others brought from the Samoa Islands will be noticed in a future

Reports on the Discovery of Peru, by Clements R. Markham, C.B., p. 53 (London: Hakluyt Soc. 1872).

2 Oldfield's 'Aborigines of Australia' (Trans. Eth. Soc.). The author was employed (1861) in collecting specimens of timber for the International Exhibition.

3 Commissioner for Victoria at the Geographical Congress of Venice, September 1881.

4 It is instructive to note the novel application of old inventions to general use when the necessities of the age demand them. The detonating and explosive force of gunpowder was known, in the form of squibs and fireworks, centuries before firearms were required.

The power of steam, as a whirling toy and a copper vessel prove, was familiar to the old Egyptians, and perhaps to the Greeks and Romans under the name of aolipyla (alóλov múλai). But only at the end of the last century its motive force attracted general attention; it became a necessary of civilised life, and at once superseded the sailer and the stage coach. And by aid of the Past we may project the Future. Man will bungle over the balloon, but he will never fly straight till railways and steamers become too slow for him when levitation,' in fact, shall become a necessity. Now the mode of transit would be an unmitigated evil to humanity.

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