1892-93.] NOTES ON THE WESTERN DENES. 43 



accompanied the army of Xerxes, who were so savage that they possessed 

 only weapons of stone and bone . . . ; they had long bows made of 

 the ribs of palm leaves and reed arrows with pebble points ; their javelins 

 were pointed with the horns of gazelles." * Five hundred years later, 

 Tacitus says of the Fenni : " They have no (iron) weapons. Their only 

 means of attack are arrows to which, having no iron, they give a bone 

 point."-f Caesar tells us in his De Bello Gallico % that the Gauls, while 

 besieging Alesia (52 B.C.), made use of stones and pebbles. An epic 

 poem of the fifth century describes two warriors battling with stone 

 axes.§ St. Ouen, bishop of Rouen in the seventh century,- speaks of flint 

 hatchets in his " Life of St. Eligius." As far down as 1066, projectiles of 

 stone were in use in Europe according to William of Poitiers. It even 

 appears that more than a century later the Scots of Wallace made us3 of 

 stone arms. i| 



Histor)' records many other similiar examples. I am well aware that 

 the advocates of the great antiquity of man and human implements base 

 their views on divers other reasons. But I think that all of these can 

 be as easily disposed of. 



Industrial Implements. 



The facts above recited are necessary to establish the really modern 

 origin of many stone implements which some regard as absurdly ancient, 

 and therefore if, in the course of the present monograph and more 

 particularly of this Chapter, Dene implements or weapons are occasionally 

 assimilatgd to objects, even palaeolithic, of the same description found in 

 the alluvial strata of Europe, my comparisons, instead of appearing 

 preposterous, should be construed as additional evidence of the relatively 

 recent origin of the European "finds." For, I cannot help thinking that 

 some spear heads, for instance, which were in use here but one hundred 

 years ago are identical in form and finish with weapons of the Solutrian 

 period of the unpolished stone age. As for the industrial implements,, 

 and especially the axes of the prehistoric Denes, though they might not 

 perhaps be classed with strict propriety among palaeolithic implements^ 

 I think they could not properly be styled neolithic, since they were 

 mostly unpolished, except at the cutting edge. 



* Die alien Hchlenhezuohner, p. 30. 



t.<4//<</ Christian Anthropology, p. 320. 



JBook VIL, 81. 



§ Ampere, Hist aire litfcraire. 



II Christian Anthropology, passim. 



