Marco Polo and too many of the moderns, spoke of the world generally after studying a very small part in particular. The Halicarnassian here evidently alludes to an epoch which had made notable advances upon the Quaternary Congener of the Simiads. We must return to a much earlier age. Lucretius, whose penetrating genius had a peculiar introvision, wrote like a modern scientist : Arma antiqua manus, ungues dentesque fuerunt, Et lapides et item sylvarum fragmina rami ; Sed prius æris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus. 1 Gentleman Horace is almost equally correct : Quum prorepserunt primis animalia terris, Mutum et turpe pecus, glandem atque cubilia propter How refreshing is the excellent anthropology of these pagans after the marvelmyths of man's Creation propounded by the so-called 'revealed' religions. For the better distribution of the subject I shall here retain the obsolete and otherwise inadmissible, because misleading, terms-Age of Stone, Age of Bronze, Age of Iron. From the earliest times all the metals were employed, without distinction, for weapons offensive and defensive: besides which, the three epochs intermingle in all countries, and overlap one another; they are, in fact, mostly simultaneous rather than successive. As a modern writer says, like the three principal colours of the rainbow, these three stages of civilisation shade off the one sided over the senate with a Sword by his side and a mail-coat under his tunic. 1 De Rer. Nat. v. 1282. He speaks of Italy, where copper and bronze historically preceded iron. 2 Sat. i. 3. Leading to the fourth, or Historic, and the fifth, or Gunpowder, age of weapons. In these ages' we have a fine instance of hasty and indiscriminate generalisation. They originated in Scandinavia, where Stone was used almost exclusively from the beginning of man's occupation till B. C. 2000-1000. At that time the Bronze began, and ended with the Iron about the Christian era. Thomsen, who classified the Copenhagen Museum in 1836; Nilsson, the Swede, who founded comparative anthropology (1838 -43); Forchhammer and Worsaäee, the Dane, who illustrated the Bronze Age (1845), fairly established the local sequence. It was accepted by F. Keller, of the Zurich Lake (1853), by Count Gozzadini, of Bologna (1854), by Lyell (1863), and by Professor Max Müller (1863, 1868, and 1873), who seems to have followed the Swiss studies of M. Morlot (Bulletin de la Soc. Vaudoise, tome vi. etc.) Unhappily, the useful order was applied to the whole world, when its deficiency became prominent and palpable. I note into the other; and yet their succession, as far as Western Europe' is concerned, appears to be equally well defined with that of the prismatic colours, though the proportion of the spectrum may vary in different countries. And, as a confusion of ideas would be created, especially when treating of the North European Sword, by neglecting this superficial method of classification, I shall retain it while proceeding to consider the development of the White Arm under their highly conventional limits. I must, morcover, remark that the ternary division, besides having no absolute chronological signification, and refusing to furnish any but comparative dates, is insufficient. Concomitant with, and possibly anterior to, the so-called Stone Age, wood, bone, teeth, and horn were extensively used; and the use has continued deep into the metal ages. Throughout the lower valley of the River of the Amazons, where stone is totally wanting, primitive peoples must have armed themselves with another material. The hard and heavy trees, both of the Temperates and the Tropics, supplied a valuable material which could be treated simply by the use of fire, and without metal or even stone. Ramusio speaks of a sago-wood (Nibong or Caryota urens) made into short lances by the Sumatrans: 'One end is sharpened and charred in the fire, and when thus prepared it will pierce any armour much better than iron would do.'2 The weapon would be fashioned by the patient labour of days and weeks, by burying in hot ashes, by steaming and smoking, by charring and friction, by scraping with shells and the teeth of rodents, and by polishing with a variety of materials: for instance, with the rasping and shagreenlike skin of many fishes, notably the ray; with rough-coated grasses, and with the leaves of the various 'sandpaper-trees' which are hispid as a cat's tongue. And the first step in advance would be dressing with silex, obsidian, and other cutting stones, and finishing with pumice or with the mushroom-shaped corallines. I shall reserve for the next chapter a description of the sabre de bois, unjustly associated in the popular saying with the pistolet de paille. Bone, which includes teeth, presented to savage man a hard and durable material for improving his coarse wooden weapons. Teledamus or Telegonus, son of Circe and founder of Tusculum 3 and Præneste, according to tradition slew his father, Ulysses, with a lance-head of fish bone-aculeum marinæ bellua. The teeth of the Squalus and other gigantum ossa or megatherian remains supplied points for the earliest projectiles, and added piercing power to the blow of the club. That a Bone Age may be traced throughout the world, and that the phrase a 'bone- and stoneusing people' is correct, was proved by the Weltausstellung of Vienna (1873), whose 1 In Denmark the division is marked even by the vegetation. The Stone Age lies buried under the fir-trees; the oak-stratum conceals the Bronzes, and the Iron Age is covered by birch and elders (Jähns, p. 2). 2 Yule's Marco Polo, ii. 208. 3 Servius, ad Æneid. ii. 44, 'Sic notus Ulysses.' 4 Col. A. Lane Fox (Prim. War., p. 24) notices the bone implements of the French caves and their resemblance, amounting almost to identity, with those found in Sweden, among the Eskimos, and the savages of Tierra del Fuego. splendid collection found an able describer in Prof. A. Woldrich. The caves of venerable Moustier (Département Dordogne), of Belgium, and of Lherm (Département Arriège) contributed many jawbones of the cave bear (Ursus spelæus); the ascending ramus of the inferior maxilla had been cut away to make a convenient grip, and the strong corner-teeth formed an implement or an instrument, a tool or a weapon. The caves of Peggau in Steiermark (Styria), of Palkau in Moravia, and the Pfahlbauten 2 or Pile-villages of Olmütz, produced a number of bone articles and remnants of the cave bear. These rude implements remind us of the weapon used to such good effect by the Biblical Samson, the Hebrew type of Hercules, the strong man, the slayer of monsters, and the Sun-god (Shamsún).3 The wilder tribes of Cambodia convert the bony horn of the sword-fish into a spear head, with which they confidently attack the rhinoceros. At Kotzebue Sound Captain Beechey found lances made of a wooden staff ending in a walrustooth; and this defence was also adapted to a tomahawk-point. The New Guinea tribes tip their arrows with the teeth of the saw-fish and the spines of the globe-fish (Diodon and Triodon). The horny style of the Malaccan king-crab (Limulus), a 1 Mittheilungen der Wien. Anthrop. Gesellschaft. Vienna, 1874. 2 Pfahlbau (pfahl=palus) was originally applied to the pile-villages of the Swiss waters (The LakeDwellings of Switzerland, by Dr. Ferdinand Keller). 3 Wilkinson opines that the Egyptian Khons or Khonsu, the new moon of the year which appeared at the autumnal equinox when the world was made,' becomes the Biblical Sem, and that Sampson' is Sem-Kon, or Sun-fire. Jablonski (Pantheon Egyp tiorum) supported the theory that Son, Sem, Con, Khons, or Djom was the god or genius of the summer sun. Travels into Indo-China, &c. ii. 147, by Henri Mouhot, 1858-59. Crustacean sometimes reaching two feet in length, is also made into an arrow-pile.' The Australians of King George's Sound arm their spears with the acute barbules of fishes; and the natives of S. Salvador, when discovered by Columbus, pointed their lances with fish-teeth. The Greenlander's 'nuguit' (fig. 23) is mentioned by Crantz as armed with the narwhal's horn, and the wooden handle is carved in relief with two human figures. By its side is another spear (fig. 24) with a beam in narwhal-shape, the foreshaft being composed of a similar ivory, inserted into the snout so as to represent the natural defence. Here we see the association in the FIG. 22. Sting of FIG. 24. NARWHAL SHAFT AND 88 FIG. 23. THE GREENLAND NUGUIT. FIG. 25.-JADE PATTU-PATTUS. maker's mind between the animal from which the weapon is derived and the purpose of destruction for which it is chiefly used. It also illustrates the well-nigh universal practice amongst savages of making their weapons to imitate animate forms. The reason may be a superstition which still remains to be explained. Foreshafts and heads of bone are still applied to the arrows of the South African Bushmans. They alternate with wood, chert, and metal throughout the North American continent, from Eskimo-land to California. A notable resemblance has been traced between the bone-club of the Nootka Sound Indians,' and 'Pile,' applied to the arrow-head (as 'quarrel' to the bolt of the crossbow), is a congener of the German pfeil, an arrow. The Scandinavian is pila, the Anglo-Saxon pil, apparently a congener of the Latin pilum. the jade Pattu-Pattu or Meri of New Zealand. Hence it has been suspected that this short, flat weapon, oval or leaf-shaped, and made to hold in the hand, as if it were a stone celt, was originally an imitation of the os humeri. Like the celt, also, is the stone club found by Colonel A. Lane Fox in the bed of the Bawn river, north Ireland.1 The long bones of animals, with the walls of marrow-holes obliquely cut and exposing the hollow, were fastened upon sticks and poles, forming formidable darts and spears. The shape thus suggests the bamboo arrowheads of the North Americans, whose cavity also served to carry poison. They would, moreover, easily be fashioned by fracture, and by friction upon a hard and rough-grained substance, into Swords and daggers. The Fenni, or Finns, of Tacitus (Germ.' c. 46), having no iron, used bone-pointed arrows. The Innuits, or Eskimos, of Greenland and other parts of the outer north, form with the ribs of whales their shuttles as well as their Swords. In 'Flint Chips' we find that the ancient Mexicans had bone-daggers. Wilde 3 gives a unique specimen of such a weapon found in the bed of the River Boyne 'in hard blue clay, four feet under sand, along with some stone spear-heads.' Formed out of the leg-bone of one of the large ruminants, it measures ten and a sixth inches long, the rough handle being only two and a half inches; the blade is smooth, and wrought to a very fine point. This skeyne (the Ulster Journal of Archæology for 1857. 2 The Dacota tribe is said still to 'doctor' the bullet by filling with venom four drilled holes, which are covered by pressing down the projecting lips or rims of the metal. Unfortunately, travellers tell us that the venom is the cuticle of the cactus, which is quite harmless. The Papuans tip their arrows with a human bone, which is poisoned by being thrust into a putrid corpse. Hence, they say, Commodore Goodenough met his death. P. 258, Descriptive Catalogue of the Antiquities in the Royal Irish Academy, by the late (Sir) William R. Wilde. The Greeks, from the days of Homer, followed by the Romans, considered the use of poisoned arrows a characteristic of the barbarian. The learned author adds, thus confirming the |