The Book of the Sword

[1] I refer to a vivacious but one-sided article on ‘The Sword,’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, May 1881.

[2] The Past in the Present, &c. (Edinburgh: Douglas, 1880.)

[3] Frederick the Great declared that an army moves like a serpent, upon its belly. According to Plutarch, the snake was held sacred because it glides without limbs, like the stars. Fire, says Pliny (Nat. Hist. vii. 57, and xiii. 42), was first struck out of the stone by Pyrodes, son of Cilix—silex, or flint, the match of antiquity; and hence it was called πῦρ; and Vincent de Beauvais explains: ‘Silex est lapis durus, sic dictus eo quod ex eo ignis exiliat.’ It is the Sanskrit शिल (shila), a stone, both words evidently deriving from a common root, shi or si. The ‘religiosa silex’ of Claudian (Rapt. Proserp. i. 201) was probably a block of stone like those representing Zeus Kasios, the Paphian Venus, not to mention the host of stones worshipped in Egyptian and Arab litholatry, and the old Palladium of Troy transported to Rome. ‘Prometheus,’ who taught man to preserve fire in the ferule, or stalk, of the giant fennel, was borrowed by the Hindus and converted into Pramantha. ‘Pramantha,’ however, is the upright fire-stick, first made by Twastu, the Divine Carpenter, who seems to have been a brother of Ἑστία, the Hearth; and hence it has been held to be the male symbol. According to Plato, πῦρ (whence pyrites = sulphuret of iron), ὕδωρ, and κύων are Phrygian words; and evidently they date from the remotest antiquity. Pir (sun-heat) is found even in the Quichua of Peru, and enters into the royal name ‘Pirhua.’ The French and Belgian caverns prove that striking fire by means of pyrites was known to primitive man.

[4] There are still races which are unable to kindle fire. This is asserted of the modern Andamanese by an expert, Mr. H. Man, Journ. Anthrop. Inst. Feb. 1882, p. 272. The same was the case with the quondam aborigines of Tasmania.

[5] This Adam Primus was of both sexes, the biune parent of Genesis (v. 3)—‘male and female created He them;’ hence the pre-Adamites of Moslem belief. The capital error of Biblical readers in our day is to assume all these myths and mysteries as mere historical details. Men had a better appreciation of the Hebrew arcana in the days of Philo Judæus.

[6] I have noted his labours in the list of ‘Authorities.’

[7] Chap. iii. p. 43, translated for the Hakluyt Society by Clements R. Markham, C.B. (London, 1869). It is regretable that a senile Committee of exceeding ‘properness’ cut out so much of this highly-interesting volume. The Spaniard travelled in a.d. 1532–50, published the first part of his work in 1553, and died about 1560. Readers who would study the most valuable anthropological parts of the book are driven to the French translation quoted by Vicente Fidel Lopez (Les Races Aryennes du Pérou, p. 199. Paris, Franck, 1873).

[8] We need not go to the classics, Greek and Roman, for the idea of metamorphosis. It is common to mankind, doubtless arising from the resemblance of beast to man in appearance, habits, or disposition; and it may date from the days when the lower was all but equal to the higher animal.

[9] Seven Years in South Africa, 1872–79, vol. i. p. 245, and vol. ii. p. 199 (Sampson Low and Co., 1881). The Simiads were African baboons, which fear man less than those of other continents.

[10] Wilkinson, I. 1. Unruliness was punished by ‘stick and no supper.’ The old Nile-dwellers, like the Carthaginians and the mediæval Tartars, were famous for taming and training the wildest animals, the cat o’ mountain, leopards, crocodiles, and gazelles. The ‘war-lions of the king’ (Ramses II.) are famed in history. They also taught domestic cats to retrieve waterfowl, and decoy-ducks to cater for the table.

[11] Thus Lucretius (v. 1301) calls the elephant ‘anguimanus.’ As is well known, there is a quasi-specific difference between the Indian and the African animal. The latter is shorter, stouter, and more compactly built than the former; the shape of the frontal bones differ, the tusks are larger and heavier, and the ears are notably longer. The latter trait appears even in old coins. Judging from the illustrated papers, I should not hesitate to pronounce the far-famed Jumbo to be an Asiatic, and not, as usually held, an African.

[12] The word wrongly written ‘Esquimaux,’ which suggests a French origin, is derived from the Ojibwa Askimeg, or the Abenakin Eskimantsic, meaning ‘eaters of raw flesh.’ Old usage applies it to the races of extreme North America, and of the Asiatic shore immediately opposite. Innuit, a more modern term, signifies only ‘the people,’ like Khoi-khoi (‘men of men’), the Hottentots, and like ‘Bantu’ (Folk), applied, or rather misapplied, to the great South African race. Innuit, moreover, is by no means universal. The Eskimos supply a valuable study; amongst other primæval peculiarities, they have little reverence for the dead, and scant attachment to place.

[13] ‘Brave Master Shoe-tye, the great traveller’ (Measure for Measure, iv. 3). The tale of porcupines ‘shooting their quills at the dogs, which get many a serious wound thereby,’ is in M. Polo (i. 28). Colonel Yule quotes Pliny, Ælian, and the Chinese. The animal drops its loose quills when running, and when at bay attempts, hedgehog-like, to hide and shield its head. It is, as the Gypsies know, excellent eating, equal to the most delicate pork; only somewhat dry without the aid of lard.

[14] Ammianus Marcellinus (xxiii. chap. 4), quoted in chap. 2.

[15] Odyss. xviii. 130, 131. ‘Qui multum peregrinatur, rarò sanctificatur,’ said the theologians. Hence the modern:—

[16] Sir John Lubbock has calculated that among the North American savages the proportion of man to the animals which feed him is 1 to 750; and, as the hunter is at least four times as long-lived as his prey, the ratio might be increased, 1 to 3000. If this were so, and all the bones were preserved, there would be 3,000 bestial skeletons to one human. Without assuming with Mr. Evans (p. 584) that ‘respect for the dead may be regarded as almost instinctive in man,’ and that human remains would be buried, we here find one cause of the present insufficiency of the geologic record.

[17] M. Eduard Pietri distributes Prehistoric Archæology proper into two ages, the Agreutic and the Georgic. Under the former he classifies the Barylithic (glacial Drift age) and the Leptolithic. Under the Georgic are included the Neolithic, the Chalcitic (copper and bronze), and the Proto-sideric.

[18] Essay on Man, iii. 172–6.

[19] The sepia (squid, cuttle-fish, Loligo vulgaris) defends itself by discharging its ‘ink-bag’ embedded in the liver, and escapes in the blackened water. This is as true a defence as a shield.

[20] From the Greek τὸ τόξον, the bow (and arrow, Iliad, viii. 296), which seems to be a congener of the Latin taxus, the yew-tree, a favourite material for the weapon. Hence taxus, like the Scandinavian îr or ŷr, the Keltic jubar, and the Slavonian tisu, all meaning the yew-tree, denote the bow as well. The Skalds called the bow also almr (elm-tree), and askr, or mountain-ash, the μελία, which the Greeks applied to the spear. From τόξον came τοξικὸν, ‘arrow-poison,’ the Latin toxicum, whose use survives in our exaggerated term ‘intoxicating liquors.’

[21] This I know to my cost, having offended a Guanaco at Cordova, in the Argentine Republic; it straightway spat in my face with unpleasantly good aim.

[22] Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, ii. chap. 2.

[23] Not unlike the name of a certain Australian Wagga-Wagga which has been heard in the English law-courts.

[24] In Land and Water doubts have been thrown upon these single combats of the whale and thresher. See the late Mr. Buckland’s papers (October 2, 1880); Lord Archibald Campbell’s sketch; and the same paper, February 26, 1881. Those on board the wrecked cruiser H.M.S. Griffon, myself included, witnessed a fight between whale and shark in the Bay of Biafra (1862?). The Carcharias family takes its name from the sharp and jagged teeth, ἀπὸ τῶν καρχαρῶν ὀδόντων.

[25] Anthrop. Collection, p. 180. Demmin, however, is additionally incorrect by making the article ‘two and a half feet in length’ (Arms and Armour, p. 413, Bell’s edition, London, 1877). In Catalogue of Indian Art in the South Kensington Museum, by Lieut. H. H. Cole, R.E. (p. 313), Sívají is made to murder the Moslem with the ‘bíchwa,’ or scorpion, a ‘curved double blade.’ This probably refers to the dagger which made ‘sicker.’

[26] P. 402, where he calls ‘Sívají’ Sevaja.

[27] Elphinstone’s History, ii. 468.

[28] It is, they say, adored at the old fortress and Maráthá capital, Sattára (= Sát-istara, the seven stars or Pleiades). Here, too, is Sívají’s Sword ‘Bhawáni,’ a Genoa blade of great length and fine temper. Mrs. Guthrie, who saw the latter, describes it (vol. i. p. 426) as a ‘fine Ferrara (?) blade, four feet in length, with a spike upon the hilt to thrust with.’ She also notices the smallness of the grip. The Indian Museum of South Kensington contains a bracelet of seven tiger’s-claws mounted in gold, with a claw clasp (No. 593, 1868). M. Rousselet, who visited Baroda in 1864, describes in his splendid volume one of the Gaekhwar or Baroda Rajah’s favourite spectacula, the ‘naki-ka-kausti’ (kushti). The nude combatants were armed with ‘tiger’s-claws’ of horn; formerly, when these were of steel, the death of one of the athletes was unavoidable. The weapons, fitted into a kind of handle, were fastened by thongs to the closed right hand. The men, drunk with Bhang or Indian hemp, rushed upon each other and tore like tigers at face and body; forehead-skins would hang in shreds; necks and ribs would be laid open, and not unfrequently one or both would bleed to death. The ruler’s excitement on these occasions often grew to such a pitch that he could scarcely restrain himself from imitating the movements of the duellists.

[29] Pliny, xxxii. 6.

[30] Thompson’s Passions of Animals, p. 225.

[31] Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates, i. 193.

[32] Prim. Warfare, i. p. 22.

[33] Prim. Warfare, i. p. 21.

[34] Ibid. ii. p. 22.

[35] The spiral horn is shown by Colonel Yule (Marco Polo, ii. 273, second edition) in an illustration as ‘Monoceros and the Maiden.’ The animal, however, appears from the short tail to be a tapir, not a rhinoceros. That learned and exact writer remarks that the unicorn supporter of the Royal Arms retains the narwhal horn. The main use of the latter in commerce is to serve as a core for the huge wax-candles lighted during the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church.

[36] So it is called in the Catalogue of the India Museum at South Kensington; the derivation is evidently from the Hindostani singh, a horn.

[37] Boutell (Arms and Armour, fig. 61, p. 269) engraves a parrying weapon with a blade at right angles to the handle. He calls it a ‘Moorish Adargue’ (fifteenth century). The latter word (with the r) is simply the Arabic word el-darakah, a shield, the origin of our ‘targe’ and ‘target.’ The adaga (not adarga, cantos i. 87, viii. 29) with which Camoens in The Lusiads (ii. 95, &c.) arms the East Africans is a weapon of the Mádu kind. I have translated it ‘dag-targe,’ because in that part of the world it combines poniard and buckler. The savage and treacherous natives of the Solomon Islands (San Christoval, &c.) still use a nondescript weapon, half Sword and half shield, some six feet long.

[38] Captain Speke’s Dictionary of the Source of the Nile, p. 652 (Edinburgh: Blackwoods, 1863).

[39] In the form called Manchette, or cutting at hand, wrist, and forearm with the inner edge. It is copiously described in iv. 45–54 of my New System of Sword Exercise, &c. (London: Clowes, 1876).

[40] Primitive Warfare, p. 24.

[41] Sir Charles Lyell, Geological Evidences of Antiquity of Man, p. 13 (London: Murray, 1863). Dr. W. Lauder Lindsay (Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot. vol. v. p. 327) says of the Maori tokis or stone-hatchets, they were used chiefly for cutting down timber and for scooping canoes out of the trunks of forest trees; for driving posts for huts; for grubbing up roots, and killing animals for food; for preparing firewood; for scraping the flesh from the bones when eating, and for various other purposes in the domestic arts. But they were also employed in times of war as weapons of offence and defence, as a supplementary kind of tomahawk.

[42] The French sarbacane, the Italian and Spanish cerbotana, the Portuguese gravatana, and the German Blasrohr (blow-tube) is, according to Demmin (p. 468), arbotana, or rather carpicanna, derived from ‘Carpi,’ the place of manufacture, and the Assyrian (Kane), Greek and Latin κάννα (canna), whence ‘cannon.’ This tube, spread over three distinct racial areas in Southern Asia, Africa, and America, is used either for propelling clay balls or arrowlets, poisoned and unpoisoned. It is the sumpitan of Borneo, where Pigafetta (1520) mentions reeds of this kind in Cayayan and Palavan Islands. The hollow bamboo is still used by the Laos of Siam, and is preserved among the Malagasy as a boyish way of killing birds. Père Bourieu notes it among the Malaccan negrito aborigines, whom the Moslem Malays call ‘Oran-Banua’ (men of the woods); the weapon they term tomeang. It is known in Ceylon, in Silhet, and on both sides of the Bay of Bengal. Condamine describes it among the Yameos (South American Indians); Waterlow and Klemm, in New Guinea, and Markham among the Uapes and other tribes on the Amazonas head-waters. In the New World it is of two varieties: the long heavy zarabatana, and the thinner, slighter pucuna. Finally, it has degraded to the ‘pea-shooter’ of modern Europe. The principal feature of the weapon is the poisoned dart; it is therefore unknown amongst tribes who, like the Andamanese, have not studied toxics (Journ. Anthrop. Inst. p. 270, February 1882).

[43] See the hamus ferreus pointed at both ends in Demmin (p. 124); and the German Fussängel (p. 465). The larger caltrop was called tribulus, stylus or stilus (Veget. De Re Mil. iii. 24). The knights of mediæval Europe planted their spurs rowels upwards to serve the same purpose.

[44] ‘Make your hand perfect by a third attempt,’ said Timocrates in Athenæus, i. cap. 4.

[45] ‘Hitherto,’ remarks Colonel A. Lane Fox, ‘Providence operates directly on the work to be performed by means of the living animated tool; henceforth it operates indirectly on the progress and development of creation, first through the agency of the instinctively tool-using savage, and, by degrees, of the intelligent and reasoning man.’

[46] J. F. Rowbotham: ‘Certain reasons for believing that the Art of Music, in prehistoric times, passed through three distinct stages of development, each characterised by the invention of a new form of instrument; and that these stages succeeded one another in the same order in various parts of the world’ (Journ. Anthrop. Inst. May 1881). The author states that the Veddahs (properly Vædiminissu, or ‘sportsmen’) of Ceylon, the Mincopis (Andamans), and the people of Tierra del Fuego ‘have no musical instruments at all.’

[47] Opuscula fidicularum, &c. (London: Mitchell and Hughes).

[48] Specus erant pro domibus. Caverns appear to be divisible into three classes: dwelling-places—including refuges, where, as Prometheus says (i. 452), ‘Men lived like little ants beneath the ground in the gloomy recesses of grots’—storehouses, and sepulchres. All were in Lyell’s third phase. The first was when the rock began to form the channel by dissolution; the second, when a regular river flowed; and the third, when earth and air, instead of water, filled the bed.

[49] Aristotle Darwin holds (sorrow! that we should say ‘held’): ‘Our male semi-human progenitors possessed great canine teeth,’ as is still shown by a few exceptional individuals. Hence we derived the trick of uncovering the eye-tooth when sneering or snarling at ‘Brother Man.’

[50] Quoted from Mr. Edward T. Stevens in Flint Chips; Col. A. Lane Fox (Catal. p. 158).

[51] History of the Discovery and Conquest of the Canary Islands, which dates from 1792. The unfortunate ‘master-mariner’ (see my Wanderings in West Africa, i. 116) borrows from the Spanish of Abreu-Galindo. Mr. F. W. Newman (Libyan Vocabulary: Trübner, 1882) has illustrated the four Libyan languages—the Algerian Kabáil (ancient Numidian), the Moroccan Shilhá (Mauritanian), the Ghadamsi (of which we know little), and the Tuárik (guides), or Tarkiya (Gætulian). ‘Guanche’ is a corruption of guan (Berber wan), ‘one person,’ and Chinet, or Tenerife Island; guan-chinet, meaning ‘a man of Tenerife.’ I have returned to this subject in my last book on the Gold Coast (i. chap. 5).

[52] The word, also written ‘Hüttentüt,’ and originally Dutch, is supposed to be an uncomplimentary imitation of the cluck-like or smack-like ‘sonant,’ which characterises their complicated and difficult language, and which has infected the neighbouring sections of the great South African family of speech. The Hottentots had already reached the pastoral stage when first visited by Europeans; whereas the Bushmans then, as now, were huntsmen. Some derive the Hottentot-Bushman ‘click’ from the Egyptian article T (á). But Klaproth found it in Circassia, Whitmee amongst the Melanesian Negritos, and Haldeman amongst certain North American tribes. Professor Mahaffy notices that ‘old women among us express pity by a regular palatal click.’ On the continent of Europe it expresses a kind of ‘Don’t-you-wish-you-may-get-it?’ Dr. Hahn, who has lately published a scientific work upon the Khoi-Khoi, favourably reviewed by Professor Max Müller in the Nineteenth Century, has treated the subject exhaustively.

[53] I can bear personal witness to the prowess of the ruffians of Nazareth, who call themselves, most falsely, Greeks. In 1871, when encamped near the village, three of my servants were so severely wounded with hand-stones that one was nearly killed.

[54] Prof. Maspero, of Bulak, told me that he had some doubts about the correctness of Wilkinson’s illustration showing ‘ancient Egyptians throwing knives.’

[55] The facon (faulchion) is about two feet long. Both weapons are thrown in two ways. The more common is to lay the blade flat on the palm, which is narrowed by contracting the thumb and the musculus guinearum at the root of the little finger. The other is by holding the handle and causing the dart to reverse, so as to strike point foremost. The best guard is a revolver.

[56] Critical Enquiry into Antient Armour, &c., by Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, Kt., preface, p. viii. (4to, 1842).

[57] It is not, as usually supposed, a ‘bastard French word,’ from fustis, a staff, and βάλλειν, to throw.

[58] Our ‘bow’ is the Gothic bogo (a bender?), Scand. bogi, Dan. buc, and Old Germ. poko. (Jähns, p. 18.) The ancients made fine distinctions in slings: thus the three-thonged weapon of Ægeum, Patræ, and Dymæ was held far superior to that of the Baleares (‘Slinging-Isles’), which had only one strap (Livy, xxxviii. 30).

[59] Pliny, vii. 57. The legend points to the excellent archery of the Scythians (Turanians) and the Persians.

[60] Even in modern days Dr. Woodward suggests that the first model of flint arrow-heads was brought from Babel, and was preserved after the dispersion of mankind. This is admirably archaic.

[61] The crossbow is apparently indigenous amongst various tribes of Indo-China, but reintroduced into European warfare during the twelfth century (Yule’s Marco Polo, ii. 143).

[62] The military engines of the ancients were chiefly on the torsion principle; those of the mediævals were of two types, the sling and the crossbow. The ‘tormentum’ was so called because all its parts were twisted; the ‘scorpion’ (or catapult), because the bow was vertically placed, like the insect’s raised tail; and the ‘onager,’ because the ‘wild asses, when hunted, throw the stones behind them by their kicks, so as to pierce the chests of those who pursue them, or to fracture them.’ So at least says A. Marcellinus (Hist. xxiii. 4). I cannot but suspect that Anna Comnena’s τζάγρα is a corruption of onager (Yule’s Marco Polo, ii. 144).

[63] The National Museum of Prague, Old Graben Street, now Kolowrat, contains a fine collection of war-flails, especially the huge ‘morning star’ of John Zsizka, generally called Ziska.

[64] Mostly, not always, as I learnt to my cost.

[65] In a subsequent work (Bronzes, &c., pp. 27–30) Dr. Evans discusses the suggestions of Beger and of Mr. Knight Watson (Proc. Soc. Ant. 2nd S. vii. 396) that celte in Job is a misreading for certe. He justly reprobates the fashion of writing ‘Kelt,’ and the newly-coined French plural celtæ. The truth is that not a few antiquaries have confounded the instrument with the Keltic or Celtic tribes. The word, meaning a stone axe, adze, or chisel, has been erroneously derived from the Celts, properly Kelts, and by older philologists a cælando, which would convert it into a congener of cælum. It is the Latin celtis or celtes, a chisel, possibly a relative of the Welsh cellt, a flint. The word is found, according to Mr. Evans, only in the Vulgate translation of Job, in Saint Jerome, and in a forged inscription. He first met with its antiquarian use in Beger’s Thesaurus Brandenburgicus (1696), where a metal securis (axe) is called celtes.

[66] In 1650 Sir William Dugdale (Hist. of Warwickshire) spoke of stone celts as the weapons of the Ancient Britons, and in 1766 he was followed by Bishop Lyttelton. In 1797 Mr. Frere drew the attention of the Society of Antiquaries to the Drift (palæolithic) instruments occurring at Hoxne, Suffolk, together with remains of the elephant and other extinct animals. He was one of several; but, as usually happens, the wit of one man collected and systematised the scattered experience of many. The man was M. Boucher de Perthes, whose finds in the drift-gravels of St. Acheul, near Amiens (1858), appeared in the Antiquités Celtiques et Anté-diluviennes, and made an epoch, changing the accepted chronology of mankind.

[67] The stone-weapon was also called betulus, belemnites, and ceraunius (thunder-stone), ceraunium and ceraunia. So Claudian (Laus Serenæ, v. 77)— ‘Fuerunt auctores’ (says Aldovrandus) ‘qui hunc lapidem ceraunium, nempe fulminarem, indigitaverunt.’ According to Skulius Thorlacius, the stone-axe typified the splitting; the hammer, the shattering; and the arrow, the piercing, action of the bolt (Om Thor og hans Hammer). People carried these belemnites about their persons, because lightning was supposed never to strike twice in the same place.

[68] According to Suetonius, the Roman Cæsar presided over the senate with a Sword by his side and a mail-coat under his tunic.

[69] De Rer. Nat. v. 1282. He speaks of Italy, where copper and bronze historically preceded iron.

[70] Sat. i. 3.

[71] 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 Worsäae, 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 that Mr. Joseph Anderson (Scotland in Early Christian Times, p. 19) retains the ‘three stages of progress’—stone, bronze, and iron. Brugsch (History, i. 25) petulantly rejects them, declaring that Egypt ‘throws scorn upon these assumed periods,’ the reverse being the case. Mr. John Evans (The Ancient Stone Implements, &c., of Great Britain, p. 2) adopts the succession-idea, warning us that the classification does not imply any exact chronology. He finds Biblical grounds ‘in favour of such a view of gradual development of material civilisation.’ Adam’s personal equipment in the way of tools or weapons would have been but insufficient, if no artificer was instructed in brass and iron until the days of Tubal Cain, the sixth in descent when a generation covered a hundred years. Mr. Evans divides the Stone Age into four periods. First, the Palæolithic, River-gravel, or Drift, when only chipping was used; second, the Reindeer, or Cavern-epoch of Central France, and an intermediate age, when surface-chipping is found; third, the Neolithic, or surface stone-period of Western Europe, in which grinding was practised; and, lastly, the Metallo-lithic age, which attained the highest degree of manual skill.

[72] 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).

[73] Yule’s Marco Polo, ii. 208.

[74] Servius, ad Æneid. ii. 44, ‘Sic notus Ulysses.’

[75] 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.

[76] Mittheilungen der Wien. Anthrop. Gesellschaft. Vienna, 1874.

[77] Pfahlbau (pfahl = palus) was originally applied to the pile-villages of the Swiss waters (The Lake-Dwellings of Switzerland, by Dr. Ferdinand Keller).

[78] 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 Egyptiorum) supported the theory that Son, Sem, Con, Khons, or Djom was the god or genius of the summer sun.

[79] Travels into Indo-China, &c. ii. 147, by Henri Mouhot, 1858–59.

[80] ‘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.

[81] Ulster Journal of Archæology for 1857.

[82] 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.

[83] 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.

[84] The learned author adds, ‘thus confirming the opinion (deduced from the size of the hafts of our bronze Swords) that the hands of the race who used them were very small.’ I can hardly agree with him, and will give reasons in a future page.