222 THE STONE AGE — PAST AND PRESENT. 



If we go westward as far as the Canary Islands^ we find a 

 race^ considered to be of African origin^ living in the fourteenth, 

 century under purely Stone Age conditions^ making hatchets, 

 knives, lancets, and spear-heads of obsidian, and axes of green 

 jasper, and pointing their spears and digging-sticks with horns. ^ 

 It is possible that they might have once had the use of iron, 

 and have lost it on removing to the islands, where there is no 

 ore, but no evidence of this having been the case seems to 

 have been found. 



In Western Africa, when the god Gimawong came down to 

 his temple at Labode on the Gold Coast once a year, with a 

 sound like a flight of wild geese in spring, his worshippers 

 sacrificed an ox to him, killing it not with a knife, but with 

 a sharp stone." Klemm looks upon this as a sign of the high 

 antiquity of the ceremony, and, taking into consideration the 

 evidence as to the keeping up of tlie use of stone for ceremo- 

 nial purposes into the Iron Age, the inference seems a highly 

 probable one, although there is another side to this argument. 

 In order to bring this into view, and to adduce some other facts 

 bearing on evidence of the Stone Age, it will be necessary to 

 say here something more of the Myth of the Thunderbolt. 



For ages it has been commonly thought that, with the flash 

 of lightning, there falls, sometimes at least, a solid body which 

 is known as the thunder-bolt, thunder- stone, etc., as in the 

 dirge in ' Cymbeline,' — 



" Fear no more the lightning-flash, 

 Nor the all- dreaded thnnder-stone." 



The actual falling of meteoric stones may have had to do with 

 the growth of this theory, but whatever its origin, it is one of 

 the most widely spread beliefs in the world. The thing con- 

 sidered to be the thunderbolt is not always defined in accounts 

 given. It is described as a stone,^ or it may be a bit of iron- 



' Barker- Webb & Bertlielot, ' Histoire Natiirelle des lies Canaries ;' Paris, 

 1842, etc., vol. i. part i. pp. 62, 107, 138. Bory de St. Vincent, ' Essai sur les 

 Isles Fortunees ;' Paris, An XI. (1803-4), pp. 58, 75-6, 156. 



- Eomer, p. 54. Klemm, C. G., toI. iii. p. 378. 

 Bosman, ' Beschrjviug van de Guinese Goud-Zust,' etc.; Utrecht, 1704, 

 p. 109. 



