Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/229

Rh the modern Jews in one case as well as in another is not clear. As to Pliny's story of the balm of Gilead, I am told, on competent authority, that the use of stone and such things instead of iron for making incisions in the tree, if ever it really existed, could be nothing hut a superstition without any foundation in reason. It may perhaps tell in favour of the story being true, that it is only one of a number of cases mentioned by Pliny, of plants as to which the similar notion prevailed, that they would be spoiled by being touched with an iron instrument. There seems, on the whole, to be a fair case for believing that among the Israelites, as in Arabia, Ethiopia and Egypt, a ceremonial use of stone instruments long survived the general adoption of metal, and that such observances are to be interpreted as relics of an earlier Stone Age; while incidentally the same argument makes it probable that the rite of circumcision belonged to the Stone Age among the ancient Israelites, as we know it does among the modern Australians.

With regard to the foregoing accounts, there is a point which requires further remark. Glass has been mentioned by the side of stone, as a material for making sharp instruments of; and it may seem at first sight an unreasonable thing to make the use of a production which belongs to so advanced a state of civilization as glass, evidence of a Stone Age. But savages have so unanimously settled it, that glass is a kind of stone peculiarly suitable for such purposes, that where a knife of glass, or a weapon armed with it, is found, it may be confidently set down as the immediate successor of a stone one. The Fuegians and the Andaman Islanders are found to have used in this manner the bits of broken glass that came in their way; the New Zealanders have been observed to take a piece of glass in place of the sharp stone with which they cut their bodies in mourning for the dead; and the North American Indians to fix one in a wooden handle, in place of the sharp stone with which the native phleme used to be armed. The Australians substituted such pieces, when