Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/219

Rh these were of wood, those of Shin-nung were of stone, and Chi-yu made metal ones.

Among the great Tatar race to which the Turks and Mongols, and our Hungarians, Lapps, and Finns belong, accounts of a Stone Age may be found, in the most remarkable of which the widely prevailing idea that stone instruments found buried in the ground are thunderbolts, is very well brought into view. In the Chinese Encyclopaedia of the emperor Kang-hi, who began to reign in 1662, the following passage occurs:—

"Lightning-stones.—The shape and substance of lightning-stones vary according to place. The wandering Mongols, whether of the coasts of the eastern sea, or the neighbourhood of the Sha-mo, use them in the manner of copper and steel. There are some of these stones which have the shape of a hatchet, others that of a knife, some are made like mallets. These lightning-stones are of different colours; there are blackish ones, others are greenish. A romance of the time of the Tang, says that there was at Yu-men-si a great Miao dedicated to the Thunder, and that the people of the country used to make offerings there of different things, to get some of these stones. This fable is ridiculous. The lightning-stones are metals, stones, pebbles, which the fire of the thunder has metamorphosed by splitting them suddenly and uniting inseparably different substances. There are some of these stones in which a kind of vitrification is distinctly to be observed."

Moreover, within the last century the Tunguz of north-eastern Siberia, belonging to the same Tatar race, were using stone arrow-heads, while Tacitus long before made a similar remark as to their relatives the Finns, whose "only hope is in their arrows, which, from want of iron, they make sharp with bones." "Sola in sagittis spes, quas, inopia ferri, ossibus asperant." But the Tunguz have been expert iron-workers as long as we have any distinct knowledge of them, and arrow-heads of stone and bone may survive, for an indefinite number of centuries, the