Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/389

Rh very ancient date. It has still survived in Italy, where the peasants keep flint arrow-heads to preserve their houses from lightning, believing that the lightning comes down to strike with a similar stone—a superstition which Professor Gastaldi also found prevalent in Piedmont. In some instances they are carried on the person as preservatives against lightning, and in parts of the Abruzzo they are known as lingue di S. Paolo, and the countryman who finds one devoutly kneels down, picks it up with his own tongue, and jealously preserves it as a most potent amulet. In the Foresi Collection at the Paris Exhibition were some arrow-heads mounted in silver as amulets, like those in Scotland, but brought from the Isle of Elba. Another has been engraved by Dr. C. Rosa.

M. Cartailhac has published an interesting pamphlet on such superstitions, and Professor Bellucci has also dilated upon them. They are abundant in the neighbourhood of Perugia.

It is a curious circumstance, that necklaces formed of cornelian beads, much of the shape of stemmed arrow-heads, with the perforation through, the central tang, are worn by the Arabs of Northern Africa at the present day, being regarded, as I was informed by the Rev. J. Greville Chester, as good for the blood. Similar charms are also worn in Turkey. I have a necklace of fifteen such arrow-head-like beads, with a central amulet, which was purchased by my son in a shop at Kostainicza, in Turkish Croatia. Among the Zuñis of New Mexico, stone arrow-heads are frequently attached to figures of animals so as to form charms or fetishes.

Enough, however, has been said with regard to the superstitions attaching to these arrow-heads of stone; the existence of such a belief in their supernatural origin, dating, as it seems to do, to a comparatively remote period, goes to prove that even in the days when the belief originated, the use of stone arrow-heads was not known, nor was there any tradition extant of a people whose weapons they had been. And yet it is probable that of all the