Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/266

256, the close connection with the Sanskrit name of this spindle, pramantha, has never been broken. Possibly both he and the Chinese Suy-jin may be nothing more than personifications of the fire-drill.

Professor Kuhn, in his mythological treatise on 'Fire and Ambrosia,' has collected a quantity of evidence from Greek and Latin authors, which makes it appear that the fire-making instrument, whose use was kept up in Europe, was not the stick-and-groove, but the fire-drill. The operation is distinctly described as boring or drilling; and it seems, moreover, that the fire-drill was worked in ancient Europe, as in India and among the Esquimaux, with a cord or thong, for the spindle is compared to, or spoken of as, a, which instrument, as appears in the passage quoted from the Odyssey at page 241, was a drill driven by a thong.

The traces of the old fire-making in modern Europe lie, for the most part, in close connexion with the ancient and widespread rite of the New Fire, which belongs to the Aryans among other branches of the human race, and especially with one variety of this rite, which has held its own even in Germany and England into quite late times, in spite of all the efforts of the Church to put it down. This is what the Germans call nothfeuer, and we, needfire; though whether the term is to be understood literally, or whether it has dropped a guttural, and stands for fire made by kneading or rubbing, is not clear.

What the nature and object of the needfire is, may be seen in Reiske's account of the practice in Germany in the seventeenth century:—"When a murrain has broken out among the great and small cattle, and the herds have suffered much harm, the farmers determine to make a needfire. On an appointed day there must be no single flame of fire in any house or on any hearth. From each house straw, and water, and brushwood must be fetched, and a stout oak-post driven fast into the ground, and a hole bored through it; in this a wooden wind-