144 THUNDERBOLTS 



case appeal strongly to the fancy or the intelligence of the 

 British farmer. It is no use telling him that whenever 

 one opens a barrow of the stone age one is pretty sure to 

 find a neolithic axe and a few broken pieces of pottery 

 beside the mouldering skeleton of the old nameless chief 

 who lies there buried. The British farmer will doubtless 

 stolidly retort that thunderbolts often strike the tops of 

 hills, which are just the places where barrows and tumuli 

 (tumps, he calls them) most do congregate ; and that as to 

 the skeleton, isn't it just as likely that the man was killed 

 by the thunderbolt as that the thunderbolt was made by a 

 man ? Ay, and a sight likelier, too. 



All the world over, this simple and easy belief, that the 

 buried stone axe is a thunderbolt, exists among Europeans 

 and savages alike. In the West of England, the labourers 

 will tell you that the thunder-axes they dig up fell from 

 the sky. In Brittany, says Mr. Tylor, the old man who 

 mends umbrellas at Carnac, beside the mysterious stone 

 avenues of that great French Stonehenge, inquires on his 

 rounds for pierres de tonnerre, which of course are found 

 with suspicious frequency in the immediate neighbourhood 

 of prehistoric remains. In the Chinese Encyclopaedia we 

 are told that the ' lightning stones ' have sometimes the 

 shape of a hatchet, sometimes that of a knife, and some- 

 times that of a mallet. And then, by a curious misappre- 

 hension, the sapient author of that work goes on to observe 

 that these lightning stones are used by the wandering 

 Mongols instead of copper and steel. It never seems to 

 have struck his celestial intelligence that the Mongols 

 made the lightning stones instead of digging them up out 

 of the earth. So deeply had the idea of the thunderbolt 

 buried itself in the recesses of his soul, that though a 

 neighbouring people were still actually manufacturing 

 stone axes almost under his very eyes, he reversed mentally 



