140 THUNDERBOLTS 



cause and origin of the rumbling and flashing which he 

 saw so constantly around him. Naturally enough, he con- 

 cluded that the sound must be the voice of somebody ; and 

 that the fiery shaft, whose effects he sometimes noted upon 

 trees, animals, and his fellow-man, must be the somebody's 

 arrow. It is immaterial from this point of view whether, 

 as the scientific anthropologists hold, he was led to his 

 conception of these supernatural personages from his prior 

 belief in ghosts and spirits, or whether, as Professor Max 

 Miiller will have it, he felt a deep yearning in his primitive 

 savage breast toward the Infinite and the Unknowable 

 (which he would doubtless have spelt, like the Professor, 

 with a capital initial, had he been acquainted with the 

 intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet) ; but this much 

 at least is pretty certain, that he looked upon the thunder 

 and the lightning as in some sense the voice and the arrows 

 of an aerial god. 



Now, this idea about the arrows is itself very signifi- 

 cant of the mental attitude of primitive man, and of the 

 way that mental attitude has coloured all subsequent 

 thinking and superstition upon this very subject. Curiously 

 enough, to the present day the conception of the thunder- 

 bolt is essentially one of a bolt that is to say, an arrow, 

 or at least an arrowhead. All existing thunderbolts (and 

 there are plenty of them lying about casually in country 

 houses and local museums) are more or less arrow-like in 

 shape and appearance ; some of them, indeed, as we shall 

 see by-and-by, are the actual stone arrowheads of primitive 

 man himself in person. Of course the noble savage was 

 himself in the constant habit of shooting at animals and 

 enemies with a bow and arrow. When, then, he tried to 

 figure to himself the angry god, seated in the storm-clouds, 

 who spoke with such a loud rumbling voice, and killed 

 those who displeased him with his fiery darts, he naturally 



