Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/205



come to a very important class of antiquities, the stone axes and axe-hammers with a hole for the insertion of a shaft, like the ordinary axes and hammers of the present day. As to the method by which these shaft-holes were bored, I have already spoken in a previous chapter. I have also mentioned that many of them appear to belong to a time when bronze was already in use, at all events for knife-like daggers, and that they have in many countries shared with the more simply-formed celts the attribution of a heavenly origin as thunderbolts, together with the superstitious reverence due to their supernatural descent. I have, therefore, but little here to add beyond a classification and description of the various forms; but I may mention that the name by which such implements were "popularly known in Scotland almost till the close of last century was that of the Purgatory Hammer," buried with its owner that he might have the wherewithal "to thunder at the gates of Purgatory till the heavenly janitor appeared."

They are for the most part made from metamorphic or volcanic rocks, and occasionally from quartzite, but I have never seen a British perforated axe made from ordinary flint, though hammers of this material are known. Stukeley, indeed, mentions that in cleansing the moat at Tabley, near Knutsford, "they found an old British axe, or some such thing, made of large flint, neatly ground into an edge, with a hole in the middle to fasten into a handle; it would serve for a battle-axe." Stukeley was probably mistaken as to the material; but there are in the Museum at Copenhagen one or two flint axes ground to an edge, the