THE STONE AGE — PAST AND PRESENT. 209 



stone aiTow-lieads/ while Tacitus long before made a similar 

 remark as to their relatives the Finns, whose " only hope is in 

 their arrows, which, from want of iron, they make sharp with 

 bones." " Sola in sagittis spes, quas, inopia ferri, ossibus as- 

 perant."^ But the Tunguz have been exjoert iron-workers as 

 long as we have any distinct knowledge of them, and arrow- 

 heads of stone and bone may survive, for an indefinite number 

 of centuries, the main part of the Stone Age to which they 

 properly belong. Even the Egyptians, in the height of their 

 civilization, used stone arrow-heads in hunting, notwithstanding 

 their vast wealth of bronze and iron. The peculiar arrows 

 which are being shot at wild oxen in the bas-reliefs of Beni 

 Hassan^ are still to be seen in collections ; they are special as 

 to their wedge-shaped flint heads, fixed with the broad edge 

 foremost, a shape like that of the wooden-headed bird-bolts 

 of the Middle Ages. The stone arrow-heads found on the 

 battle-field of Marathon are often described, but they may have 

 all been shot by the barbarian troops, and most others found 

 in Greece are probably prte- Aryan. It is clear that metal must 

 be very common and cheap to be used in so wasteful a way as 

 in heading an arrow, perhaps only for a single shot. 



If we go back eighteen hundred years, an account may be 

 found of a people living under Stone Age conditions in a part 

 of Asia much less remote than Tartary and China. Strabo 

 gives the following description of the fish-eaters inhabiting the 

 coast of the present Beloochistan, on the Arabian Sea, and, 

 like the Aleutian Islanders of modern times, building their huts 

 of the bones of whales, with their jaws for doorways : — " The 

 country of the Ichthyophagi is a low coast, for the most part 

 without trees, except palms, a sort of acanthus, and tamarisks ; 

 of water and cultivated food there is a dearth. Both the peo- 

 ple and their cattle eat fish, and drink rain- and well-water, 

 and the flesh of the cattle tastes of fish. In making their dwell- 

 ings, they mostly use the bones of whales, and oyster-shells, 

 the ribs serving for beams and props, and the jaw-bones for 



1 Eavenstein, p. 4. 



- Tae. Germ. xlvi. ; and see Grimm, G. D. S., vol. i. p. 17.S. 



3 WUkinson, Pop. Ace, vol. i. pp. 222, 353. 



P 



