Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/232

222 Strabo mentions in Ethiopia a tribe who pointed their reed arrows in this way, and another who used as weapons the horns of antelopes. It is interesting to observe that in South Africa the spear headed in this way has survived up to our own time; Mr. Andersson saw the natives at Walfisch Bay spearing the fish left at low water, with a gemsbock's horn attached to a slender stick.

Traces of a Stone Age in Egypt, in the use of the stone arrow-head, and of the stone knife for ceremonial purposes, have been already spoken of. No account of the finding of stone implements in North Africa seems to have been published till Mr. Christy, in a journey made in Algeria in 1863, found them there. He met with flint flake knives, arrow-heads, and polished celts, at Constantine; flakes, arrow-heads, and a beautifully chipped lance head of quartzite, at Dellys on the coast; and flakes and a large pick-shaped instrument, from the desert south-east of Oran, on the confines of Morocco. At Bou-Merzoug, on the plateau of the Atlas, south of Constantine, he found, in a bare, deserted, stony place among the mountains, a collection of tombs, 1000 or 1500 in number, made of the rude limestone slabs, set up with one slab to form a roof, so as to make perfect dolmens, closed chambers where the bodies were packed in. Tradition says that a wicked people lived there, and for their sins stones were rained upon them from heaven, so they built these chambers to creep into. Near this remarkable necropolis, Mr. Christy found flint-flakes and arrow-heads.

If we go westward as far as the Canary Islands, we find a race, considered to be of African origin, living in the fourteenth century under purely Stone Age conditions, making hatchets, knives, lancets, and spear-heads of obsidian, and axes of green jasper, and pointing their spears and digging-sticks with horns. It is possible that they might have once had the use of iron, and have lost it on removing to the islands, where there is no