THE STONE AGE — PAST AND PRESENT. 211 



year an army of spirits fly through the air with rain and storm ; 

 when the sky clears, people go out and hunt in the sand for the 

 stone arrows they have dropped. The arrow-heads are found 

 most abundantly in the north of the great island of Nippon, in 

 the so-called land of the Wild Men, a population who were only 

 late and with difficulty brought under the Mikado dynasty, 

 and who belong to the same Aino race as the present inha- 

 bitants of the island of Jesso and the southern Kuriles. In 

 Japan, stone celts are frequently to be found in the collections 

 of minerals of native amateurs, and they are still sometimes 

 dug up with other objects of stone. They seem only of average 

 symmetry and finish. Here, again, the natives call such a 

 stone celt a " thunderbolt," Eai fu sehi, or Tengu no masahari, 

 " battleaxe of Tengu," Tengu being the guardian of heaven. 

 The notion is also current that they are implements of the Evil 

 Spirit, whose symbol is the fox, whence the names of " Fox- 

 hatchet," " Fox-plane." As a fox-plane, a double-flat celt is 

 shown in Siebold's plates, which may have served the purpose 

 of a plane, or, if it was fixed to a handle, that of an adze. Re- 

 gularly shaped stone knives (not mere flakes) are represented ; 

 some are like the stone knives of Egypt, but rougher; the 

 Japanese recognise them as " stone-knives." Some which 

 have been dug up are kept in the temples as relics of the time 

 of the Kami, the spirits or divinities from whom the Japanese 

 hold themselves to be descended, and whose worship is the old 

 religion of the Japanese, the way or doctrine of the Kami, 

 more commonly known by the Chinese term, Sin-tu. Some 

 stone knives, drawn by Siebold on Japanese authority, seem 

 to be of a slaty rock, which has admitted of their being very 

 neatly made in curious shapes. One very highly finished spe- 

 cimen is called the stone knife of the " Green Dragon," a term 

 which may be explained by the fact that the conventional 

 dragon of Japan has a sword at the end of his tail. 



Again, Java abounds in very high-class stone implements, 

 and such things are found on the Malay peninsula, though in 

 both these districts the natives, unlike the Polynesians, whose 

 language is so closely connected with theirs, do not even know 



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