174 The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 



scription of a shield, as one of the most graphic in Walter 

 Scott is that of a sword. Kings sat at its followers' feet ; 

 the fate of empires turned on their skill ; civilization in its 

 onward march kept time with the rise and fall of their 

 hammers. And, though stained with blood and smoke and 

 hate, their products have been plumed also with some of 

 the noblest deeds of chivalry, honor, courage, self-sacrifice 

 and manly devotion that human nature has ever reached. 



But amid all their multiplied devices as to form and 

 mechanism, the two methods, the two principles which ran 

 so conspicuously through the animal and vegetable king- 

 doms, have been equally kept up in that of man, on the 

 one side a stronger outside covering, whose efficacy was 

 chiefly in itself, as the thick garment, the bull's-hide 

 buckler, the brazen shield, the visored helmet, the plated 

 greaves, the glittering coat-of-mail, the massive fort, the 

 turreted monitor, and the steel-clad ship ; and on the other, 

 something which involved, more directly, inward skill and 

 power, as the club, the spear, the sword, the cross-bow, 

 the catapult, the matchlock-gun, the rifle, the cannon, the 

 ram, the torpedo, and behind them all the cunning, the 

 courage and the union instinct of man himself. And in 

 the struggle between them here, the same as among the 

 plants and the brutes, the result has been the supremacy 

 of the inward over the outward, and a progress ever more 

 towards their finer and more inward forms tis the ones on 

 which at last wholly to rely. The old Bible story of 

 Goliath and David, the one a giant six cubits high, 

 armed with a coat-of-mail of ''five thousand shekels in 

 weight," and a spear " like a weaver's beam," the other a 

 ruddy youth armed only with a sling and five small stones 

 out of the bi'ook, and his own skill, has been the story 

 of the ages. The barbaric nations have always relied 

 most on outward defenses, the civilized ones on those that 

 require inward skill ; and victory the world over has sided 

 with the skill. The weapons with which the lloman soldier 

 carved his way to universal empire against all the shields, 

 greaves, breast-plates and forts of his foe, were the short 

 two-edged broadsword, nineteen inches long, and the famous 

 " pilum," four feet in length, himself protected only by liis 

 own stout heart and a very light defensive armor. The 

 slender spears of tlie ancient (ireek infantry, twenty-four 

 feet in length, and the lances at a later day of the old feudal 



