collection, fifteen and a half inches in length. It is a mystery how the minute and delicate ornamentation, the even fluting like ripple marks, on these Danish flint-daggers was produced.

A better substance than flint was found in the compact sandstone and in granitic serpentine, so called because that rock resembles a snake's skin. It is easily worked, while it is harder than the common serpentine. A dagger or knife found beside a stone cist in Perthshire is described as a natural formation of micaschiste.

The Stone Age produced nothing more remarkable than the Pattu-Pattu or Meri of New Zealand, which an arrested development prevented becoming a Sword. Its shape, that of an animal's blade-bone, suggests its primitive material; and New Guinea has an almost similar form, with corresponding ornamentation in wood. What assimilates it to the Sword is that it is sharp-edged at the top as well as at the side. It is used for 'prodding' as well as for striking, and the place usually chosen for the blow is the head, above the ear, where the skull is weakest. Some specimens are of the finest green jade or nephrite,' a refractory stone which must have been most troublesome to fashion.

Wood, however hard and heavy, made a sorry cutting weapon, and stone a sorrier Sword; but the union of the two improved both. Hence we may divide wooden Swords into the plain and the toothed blades, the latter-

Armed with those little hook-teeth in the edge,

To open in the flesh and shut again.

An obvious advance would be to furnish the cutting part with the incisors of animals and stone-splinters. In Europe these would be agate, chalcedony, and rock-crystal; quartz and quartzite; flint, chert, Lydian stone, horn-stone, basalt, lava, and greenstone (or diorite); hæmatite, chlorite, gabbro (a tough bluish-green stone), true jade (nephrite), jadite, and fibrolite, found in Auvergne. Pinna and other shells have been extensively used-for instance, by the Andamanese-as arrow-heads and adze-blades.2

Tenerife, and the so-called New World, preferred the easily-cleft green-black obsidian,3 of which the Ynkas also made their knives. The Polynesian Islands show two distinct systems of attachment. In the first the fragments, inserted into the grooved side, are either tied or made fast by gum or cement. In the second they are set in a row between two small slats or strips of wood, which, lastly, are lashed to the weapon with fibres. The points are ingeniously arranged in the

Nephrite is so called because once held a sovereign cure for kidney disease. Jade is found in various parts of Europe (Page); in the Hartz (or Resin) Mountains; in Corsica (Bristowe), and about Schweinsal and Potsdam (Rudler). Saussurite, the 'Jade of the Alps,' appears about the Lake of Geneva and on Monte Rosa. Mr. Dawkins limits Jade proper in the Old World to Turkestan and China.

Jade, the Chinese you, is popularly derived from the
Persian jádú (the) magic (stone).

=

2 I need hardly notice that the mussel-shell was the original spoon, still a favourite with savages.

Humboldt (Pers. Narr. vol. i. p. 100) makes the Guanches call obsidian 'tabona'; most authors apply the word to the Guanche knife of obsidian.

opposite direction, so as to give severe cuts both in drawing and withdrawing. The Eskimos secure the teeth by pegs of wood and bone. The Pacho of the South Sea Islanders is a club studded on the inner side with shark's teeth made fast in the same manner. The Brazilian Tapuyas armed a broad-headed club with teeth and bones sharpened at the point.' In Flint Chips' we find that a North American tribe used for thrusting a wooden Sword, three feet long, tipped with mussel-shell. Throughout Australia the natives provide their spears with sharp pieces

of obsidian or crystal: of late years they have applied common glass, a new use for waste and broken bottles (fig. 70). The fragments are arranged in a row along one side near the point, and are firmly cemented. There is no evidence of this flintsetting in Ireland; but the frequent recurrence of silex implements adapted for such purpose has suggested, as in the Iroquois graves, that the wood which held

1 Neuhoff, Travels, &c. xiv. 874.

2 Our word 'glass' derives from glese (gless, glessaria), applied by the old Germans to amber (Tacit.

De Mor. Germ. cap. 45). Pliny (xxxvii. chap. 11) also notices glæsum (amber) and Glæsaria Island, by the natives called Austeravia.

them together may have perished. We read in Flint Chips' that the Selden Manuscript shows a flake of obsidian mounted in a cleft wooden handle, the latter serving as a central support, with a mid-rib running nearly the whole length. The sole use of the weapon was for thrusting.'

The people of Copan (Yucatan) opposed Hernandez de Chaves with slings, bows, and 'wooden Swords having stone edges.'2 In the account of the expedition sent out (1584) by Raleigh to relieve the colony of Virginia, we read of 'flat, edged truncheons of wood,' about a yard long. In these were inserted points of stag-horn, much in the same manner as is now practised, except that European lance-heads have taken their place. Knives, Swords, and glaives, edged with sharks' teeth,3 are found in the Marquesas; in Tahiti, Depeyster's Island, Byron's Isles, the Kingsmill Group, Redact Island, the Sandwich Islands, and New Guinea. Captain Graah notices a staff edged with shark's teeth on the east coast of Greenland, and the same is mentioned amongst the Eskimos by the late Dr. King."

FIG. 63. WOOD AND
HORN-POINTS.

In the tumuli of Western North America, Mr. Lewis Morgan, the historian of the Iroquois,' mentions that, when opening the 'burial mounds' of the Far West, rows of flintflakes occurred lying side by side in regular order; they had probably been fastened into sticks or swords like the Mexican. Hernandez describes the Mahquahuitl' or Aztec war-club as armed on both sides with razor-like teeth

6

OF THE FIFTEENTH CEN

TURY, OF IRON WOOD, WITH ΤΕΝ BLADES OF BLACK OBSIDIAN FIXED INTO THE WOOD. (This weapon is twenty-five inches long.)

of 'Itzli' (obsidian), stuck into holes along the edge, and FIG. 64-MEXICAN SWORD fastened with a kind of gum. Mr. P. T. Stevens (Flint Chips,' p. 297) says that this Mexican broadsword had six or more teeth on either side of the blade. Herrera, the historian, mentions, in his 'Decads,' 'Swords made of wood having a gutter in the fore part, in which the sharp-edged flints were strongly fixed with a sort of bitumen and thread.'7 In 1530, according to contemporary Spanish

1 Stephens, Yucatan, i. 100.

2 The curious and artistic rock inscriptions and engravings of the South African Bushmen were traced in outline by triangular flint-flakes mounted on sticks to act as chisels. The subjects were either simple figures; cows, gnus, and antelopes, a man's bust and a woman carrying a load; or compositions, as ostrich and rider, a jackal chasing a gazelle, or a rhinoceros hunting an ostrich.

3 See Chap. I.

Voyage Pittoresque autour du Monde, par M. Louis Choris, Peintre, 1822.

5 Trans. Ethno. Soc. vols. i. and ii. p. 290. • Quoted by Col. Lane Fox, Prim. War. i. 25. Prehistoric Man, by Daniel Wilson (vol. i. pp. 216-17).

E

historians, Copan was defended by 30,000 warmen, armed with these and other weapons,' especially with fire-hardened spears. The same have been represented in the sculptures of Yucatan, which imitated the Aztecs. Lord Kingsborough's ruinous work on Mexican antiquities, mostly borrowed from Dupaix, shows a similar contrivance (b and c). A Sword having six pieces of obsidian in each side of the blade, is to be seen in a museum in Mexico.2 A Mexican Sword of

the fifteenth century is of iron-wood, twenty-five inches long, and armed with ten flakes of black obsidian; and the same is the make of another Mexican Sword nearly four feet long.3

The next step would be to use metal for bone and stone. So the Eskimos of

Incidents of Travel in Central America, &c., p. 51; by J. Lloyd Stephens. The work is highly interesting, because it shows Egypt in Central America. Compare the Copan Pyramid with that of Sakkarah; the Cynocephalus head (i. 135) with those of Thebes; the beard, a tuft on the chin; the statue and its headdress (ii. 349); the geese-breeding at the palace (ii. 316); the central cross (ii. 346) which

denotes the position of the solstices and the equinoxes and the winged globe at Ocosingo (ii. 259). In Yucatan the Agave Americana took the place of the papyrus for paper-making. Indo-China also appears in the elephant-trunk ornaments (i. 156).

2 Prim. War. ii. p. 25.

The two latter are in Demmin, p. 84.

Davis Strait and some of the Greenlanders show an advance in art by jagging the edge with a row of chips of meteoric iron.' 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 sce by serrated and pierced blades of Italian daggers. That it is not yet extinct the absurd saw-bayonet of later years proves.

We now reach the time when Man, no longer contented with the baser materials-bone and teeth, horn and woodlearned 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.

كسر

FIG. 70. AUSTRALIAN SPEARS, WITH
BITS OF OBSIDIAN, CRYSTAL, OR
GLASS.

FIG. 71.-ITALIAN POISON
DAGGERS.

FIG. 72.-ARAB SWORD, WITH DOWN-CURVED GUILLONS AND SAW BLADE. (Musée d'Artillerie, G. 413, inscription not legible.)

The discovery of ore-smelting and metal-working, following that of fire-feeding, would enable Man to apply himself, with notably increased success, to the improvement of his weapons. But many races here stopped short. The Australian, who never invented a bow, contenting himself with the boomerang, could not advance beyond the curved and ensiform club before he was visited by the sailors of the West. His simplicity in the arts has constituted him, with some anthropologists, the living example of the primitive and prehistoric genus homo. The native of

1 A specimen is in the British Museum, Department of Meteorolites. (Prim. War. p. 25.)

2 The distinguished physicist, Prof. Huxley, extends, on purely anthropological grounds, the name 'Australioids' to the Dravidians of India, the Egyp

tians, ancient and modern, and the dark-coloured races of Southern Europe. I have ventured to oppose this theory in Chap. VIII. Mr. Thomas, curious to say, would make letters (alphabet, &c.) arise amongst the Dravidian quasi-savages.