The Problem of Plate Armor 269 



time; it is always preceded by plainer types, usually cuirasses of hide or 

 cotton, and scale armor. Cuirasses of rhinoceros-skin were utilized 

 in China for thousands of years, before any metal harness became 

 known. In China as well as in Egypt we clearly recognize the inter- 

 mediary stages of hide and plate armor, the surface of the hide being 

 first reinforced by irregular, scale-like metal pieces (first of copper, 

 later of iron), which gradually assumed the standard rectangular plate 

 shape; and then, by removing the hide foundation, the pure metal 

 plate armor sprang up as a new and independent type. The history of 

 defensive and offensive weapons, moreover, is closely interrelated; the 

 eternal game of modern war industry — first inventing bullet-proof 

 naval armor-plates, and then the bullets to pierce them — was in full 

 swing even in the stages of primitive life. The growing perfection of 

 metal weapons constantly forced man to devise new means of increasing 

 the power of his defensive armor, and this accounts for the coming into 

 existence of ever-varying new types. I am certainly not competent 

 on any subject of American ethnology, and must leave it to our Ameri- 

 canists to reason out the case for themselves. But this much may be 

 said. Nearly everywhere in North America, even in the eastern area, 

 we generally find the type of hide armor, the indigenous development of 

 which is admitted by Dr. Hough and cannot seriously be challenged; 

 thus hide armor may have been the oldest form of body protection in 

 war also in this region. 1 We meet there also the intermediary stages, 

 as, for instance, the wooden cuirass of the Thompson River Indians, 

 covered with elk-hide, described by James Teit, 2 and the application of 

 wooden slats, of reeds, of bone plates to the exterior or interior of the 

 cuirass, to strengthen it more efficiently, — the secondary development. 

 Finally those materials were exclusively utilized in its construction, 

 leading up to pure plate armor as a tertiary and ultimate stage. No 

 fundamental difference can be found in the employment of wood and 

 bone, or ivory, which simply present purely technical changes of mate- 

 rial; and American-Asiatic bone plate armor, after all, might be con- 

 ceived as quite a natural development, which may have arisen inde- 

 pendently, without the contact of an outside culture. Its coming into 

 existence could be explained by the trend of indigenous thought and the 



1 "The American savages were acquainted with body armor when they were 

 first encountered. Wherever the elk, the moose, the buffalo, and other great land 

 mammals abounded, there it was possible to cover the body with an impervious suit 

 of raw-hide" (O. T. Mason, The Origins of Invention, p. 390). 



2 The Thompson Indians of British Columbia {Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 

 Vol. II, p. 265). See also A. P. Niblack, The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska 

 {Report U. S. National Museum, 1888, pp. 268-270). 



