Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/233

Rh ore, but no evidence of this having been the case seems to have been found.

In Western Africa, when the god Gimawong came down to his temple at Labode on the Gold Coast once a year, with a sound like a flight of wild geese in spring, his worshippers sacrificed an ox to him, killing it not with a knife, but with a sharp stone. Klemm looks upon this as a sign of the high antiquity of the ceremony, and, taking into consideration the evidence as to the keeping up of the use of stone for ceremonial purposes into the Iron Age, the inference seems a highly probable one, although there is another side to this argument. In order to bring this into view, and to adduce some other facts bearing on evidence of the Stone Age, it will be necessary to say here something more of the Myth of the Thunder-bolt.

For ages it has been commonly thought that, with the flash of lightning, there falls, sometimes at least, a solid body which is known as the thunder-bolt, thunder-stone, etc., as in the dirge in 'Cymbeline,'—

The actual falling of meteoric stones may have had to do with the growth of this theory, but whatever its origin, it is one of the most widely spread beliefs in the world. The thing considered to be the thunderbolt is not always defined in accounts given. It is described as a stone, or it may be a bit of iron-ore, or perhaps iron, or a belemnite,, so called from , a dart, apparently with the idea of its being a thunder-bolt; for this spear-like fossil is still called in England a "thunder-stone." Dr. Falconer mentions the name of "lightning-bones" or "thunder-bones," given to fossil bones brought down as charms from the plateau of Chanthan in the Himalayas, where, of course, frequent thunder-storms are seen to account