Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/236

226 turn out to be stone implements, as they have so often done elsewhere.

The thunderbolt is thought to have a magical power, and there is especially one notion in connexion with which it comes into use. This is that it preserves the place where it is kept from lightning, the idea being apparently here, as in the belief about the "wildfire" which will be presently mentioned, that where the lightning has struck, it will not strike again, so that the place where a thunderbolt is put is made safe by having been already struck once, though harmlessly. In Shetland the thunderbolts (which are stone axes) protect from thunder, while in Cornwall the stone hatchets and arrow-heads, which fall from the clouds where the thunder produced them, announce by change of colour a change of weather. In Germany, the house in which a thunderbolt is kept is safe from the storm; when a tempest is approaching, it begins to sweat, and again it is said of it, that "he who chastely beareth this, shall not be struck by lightning, nor the house or town where that stone is," while nearly the same idea comes out in Pliny's account of the brontia, which is "like the heads of tortoises, and falling, as they think, with thunder, puts out, if you will believe it, what has been struck by lightning."

In the mythology of our race, the bolt of the Thunder-god holds a prominent place. To him, be he Indra or Zeus the Heaven-god, or the very thunder itself in person, Thunor or Thor, the Aryans give as an attribute the bolt which he hurls with lightning from the clouds. Now it is possible that this was the meaning of the Roman Jupiter Lapis. The sacred flint was kept in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and brought out to be sworn by, and with it the pater patratus smote the victim slain to consecrate the solemn treaties of the Roman people. "'If by public counsel,' he said, 'or by wicked fraud, they swerve first, in that day, Jove, smite thou the Roman people, as I here to-day shall smite this hog; and smite them so much more, as thou art abler