646 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



or closed together. The bow is fixed firmly in position in the forked 

 end of the stock by means of a pair of wooden collars, each formed 

 by bringing together the ends of a flexible split rod and binding them 

 together to form a pear-shaped ring. These collars encircle the bow 

 and brace it to a transverse bar (pi. 1, fig. 2 d), which passes through 

 the forward rectangular hole in the stock, and are tautened with a 

 wedge. In use, the bow is " set " by drawing the bowstring backward 

 until it is caught in the notch on the upper surface of the stock, the 

 limbs being separated so as to withdraw the head of the release peg 

 from the notch. The huge bow is too powerful to be bent by hand, 

 so the operation of drawing is performed with a simple but effective 

 wooden " goat's-f oot " lever (pi. 1, fig. 2 e, e), the prongs of which 

 rest against a fulcrum formed by the ends of the transverse bar 

 immediately in front of the notch. The arrow or bolt (pi. 1, fig. 2 /) — 

 which consists of a head and foreshaft of iron set in a shaft of pine 

 " feathered " with thin wooden slips — is laid in the arrow groove, 

 the slightly notched butt being just in front of the bowstring notch. 

 To discharge the bow, the two limbs of the bow are simply squeezed 

 together, with the result that the release peg is driven upward through 

 the notch, out of which it forces the bowstring, which drives the bolt 

 in front of it. Experience has taught the peasant whalers that new or 

 cleaned bolts are far less deadly than old and uncleaned ones, the 

 reason for this being that the latter are highly poisonous from the 

 septic condition of the decaying matter adhering to the rusty surface 

 of the iron heads, which are never burnished. They are even buried 

 sometimes in gangrenous flesh so as to induce this septic condition. 

 The true nature of the poison is, however, unknown to the peasants. 

 The simple release mechanism of this modern Norwegian crossbow, 

 it will be at once noticed, while differing completely from that of all 

 other European crossbows, whether ancient or modern, 1 is precisely 

 similar to that of the crossbows of the Ba-Fan, Mpongwe, Mandingo, 

 Yoruba, and Benin natives of West Africa, which I have already 

 described. The identity in structure is so absolute that it is impossible 

 to avoid the belief that all are traceable to a common origin. It is 

 most unlikely that this contrivance, which, simple as it is, required 

 some real ingenuity for its invention, should have been independently 

 arrived at in two widely separated regions of the world, by a civilized 

 people in the one region and by a savage people in the other. The 

 probability of the crossbow having been introduced into West Africa 

 by Europeans in the sixteenth or seventeenth century becomes almost 

 a certainty when we know that the structural details of the African 

 forms are actually those of certain European crossbows. It was 

 only ignorance of this fact which has caused any hesitation in accept- 



1 Sir R. Payne Gallwey makes no mention of the Norwegian wooden crossbow in his 

 important monograph on the crossbow. 





