Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/235

Rh stone implements found buried in the ground, is not more conspicuously shown in the myths of thunderbolts, elfin arrows, and purgatory hammers, than in the sham science that has been brought to bear upon them in Europe, as well as in China. It is instructive to see Adrianus Tollius, in his 1649 edition of 'Boethius on Gems,' struggling against the philosophers. He gives drawings of some ordinary stone axes and hammers, and tells how the naturalists say that they are generated in the sky by a fulgureous exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circumfixed humour, and are as it were baked hard by intense heat, and the weapon becomes pointed by the damp mixed with it flying from the dry part, and leaving the other end denser, but the exhalations press it so hard that it breaks out through the cloud, and makes thunder and lightning. But, he says, if this be really the way in which they are generated, it is odd that they are not round, and that they have holes through them, and those holes not equal through, but widest at the ends. It is hardly to be believed, he thinks. Speculation on the natural origin of high-class stone weapons and tools has now long since died out in Europe, but some faint echoes of the Chinese emperor's philosophy were heard among us but lately, in the arguments on the natural formation of the flint implements in the Drift.

With regard, then, to ideas of thunderbolts as furnishing evidence of an early Stone Age, it may be laid down that such a myth, when we can be sure that it refers to artificial stone implements, proves that such things were found by a people who, being possessed of metal, had forgotten the nature and use of these rude instruments of earlier times. Kang-hi's remarks that some of the so-called "lightning- stones" were like hatchets, knives, and mallets, and Pliny's mention of some of the cerauniæ or thunder-stones being like axes, are cases in point. But the mere mention of the belief in thunderbolts falling, as for example in Madagascar and Arracan, only gives a case for further inquiry on the suspicion that the thunderbolts in these regions may