140 TIIUNDEUHOLTS 



cause and origin of tlio rumbling and flashing which he 

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

 clud(Hl that tho sound must bo tho voice of somobody ; and 

 that tho fiery shaft, wlioso elTects he sometimes noted upon 

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

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

 as tho scientific anthropologists hold, he was led to his 

 conception of these supernatural personages from his prior 

 beli(>f in ghosts and spirits, or whether, as Professor INIax 

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

 savage breast toward the Infhiito and the Unknowable 

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

 with a capital initial, had ho been acquainted with tha 

 intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet) ; but this mucii 

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

 and tho 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 tho 

 way that mental attitude has coloured all subsequent 

 thinking and superstition upon this very subject. Curiously 

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

 bolt is essentially one of a holt — ilmt is to say, an arrow, 

 or at least an arrowhead. All existing thunderbolts (aiul 

 there are plenty of them lying about casually in country 

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

 shape and appeju'ance ; some of them, indeed, as we i-hall 

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

 man himself in person. Of course the noble savage was 

 himself in the constant habit of shooting at aninuils and 

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

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

 ■who spolvQ with such a loud rumbling voice, and killed 

 those who displeased him with his fiery darts, ho naturally 



