THUNDERBOLTS 143 



The most favourite form of thunderbolt is the polished 

 stone hatchet or ' celt ' of the newer stone age men. I 

 have never heard the very rude chipped and unpolished 

 axes of the older drift men or cave men described as 

 thunderbolts : they are too rough and shapeless ever to 

 attract attention from any except professed archaeologists. 

 Indeed, the wicked have been known to scoff at them freely 

 as mere accidental lumps of broken flint, and to deride the 

 notion of their being due in any way to deliberate human 

 handicraft. These are the sort of people who would regard 

 a grand piano as a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But the 

 shapely stone hatchet of the later neolithic farmer and 

 herdsman is usually a beautifully polished wedge-shaped 

 piece of solid greenstone ; and its edge has been ground to 

 such a delicate smoothness that it seems rather like a bit 

 of nature's exquisite workmanship than a simple relic of 

 prehistoric man. There is something very fascinating 

 about the naif belief that the neolithic axe is a genuine 

 unadulterated thunderbolt. You dig it up in the ground 

 exactly where you would expect a thunderbolt (if there 

 were such things) to be. It is heavy, smooth, well shaped, 

 and neatly pointed at one end. If it could really descend 

 in a red-hot state from the depths of the sky, launched 

 forth like a cannon-ball by some fierce discharge of 

 heavenly artillery, it would certainly prove a very formid- 

 able weapon indeed ; and one could easily imagine it 

 scoring the bark of some aged oak, or tearing off the tiles 

 from a projecting turret, exactly as the lightning is so well 

 known to do in this prosaic workaday world of ours. In 

 short, there is really nothing on earth against the theory 

 of the stone axe being a true thunderbolt, except the fact 

 that it unfortunately happens to be a neolithic hatchet. 



But the course of reasoning by which we discover the 

 true nature of the stone axe is not one that would in any 



