224 THE STONE AGE — PAST AND PRESENT. 



sliot by fairies or magicians, and in the Nortli of Ireland the 

 wizards still draw tliem out from the bodies of " overlooked " 

 cattle.^ Dr. Daniel Wilson mentions an interesting post- 

 Christian mythj which prevailed in Scotland till the close of 

 the last century, that the stone hammers found buried in the 

 ground were Purgatory Hammers for the dead to knock with 

 at the gates." 



The inability of the world to understand the nature of the 

 stone implements found buried in the ground, is not more con- 

 spicuously shown in the myths of thunderbolts, elfin arrows, 

 and purgatory hammers, than in the sham science that has 

 been brought to bear upon them in Europe, as well as in China. 

 It is instructive to see Adrianus Tollius, in his 1649 edition of 

 ' Boethius on Gems,^ struggling against the philosophers. He 

 gives drawings of some ordinary stone axes and hammers, and 

 tells how the naturalists say that they are generated in the sky 

 by a fulgureous exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circum- 

 fixed humour, and are as it were baked hard by intense heat, 

 and the weapon becomes pointed by the damp mixed with it 

 flying from the dry part, and leaving the other end denser, but 

 the exhalations press it so hard that it breaks out through the 

 cloud, and makes thunder and lightning. But, he says, if this 

 be really the way in which they are generated, it is odd that 

 they are not round, and that they have holes through them, 

 and those holes not equal through, but widest at the ends. 

 It is hardly to be believed, he thinks.^ Speculation on the 

 natural origin of high-class stone weapons and tools has now 

 long since died out in Europe, but some faint echoes of the 

 Chinese emperor's philosophy were heard among us but lately, 

 in the arguments on the natural formation of the flint imple- 

 ments in the Drift. 



With regard, then, to the use of thunderbolts as furnishing 

 evidence of an early Stone Age, it may be laid down that such 

 a myth, when we can be sure that it refers to artificial stone 



1 Wilde, Cat. E. I. A., p. 19. 



2 Wilson, Archseology, etc., of Scotland ; Edinburgh, 1851, pp. 124, 134, etc. 



^ Boetliius, ' Gemmarum & Lapidum Historia,' receusuit etc. Adrianus Tollius j 

 Ley den, 1649, p. 482. . • 



