226 THE STONE AGE PAST AND PfiESENT. 



holds a prominent place. To him^ be he Indra or Zeus the 

 Heaven-god, or the very thunder itself in person, Thunor or 

 Thor, the Aryans give as an attribute the bolt which he hurls 

 with hghtning from the clouds. Now it is clear that this was 

 the meaning of the Roman Jupiter Lapis. The sacred flint 

 was kept iu the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and brought out to 

 be sworn by, and with it the pater patratus smote the victim 

 slain to consecrate the solemn treaties of the Roman people. 

 " ' If by pubhc counsel/ he said, ' or by wicked fraud, they 

 swerve first, in that day, Jove, smite thou the Roman peo- 

 ple, as I here to- day shall smite this hog ; and smite them so 

 much more, as thou art abler and stronger.' And having said 

 this, he struck the hog with a flint stone.''^^ 



To those who read this, it is evident that the flint of Jupiter 

 was held either to be a thunderbolt or to represent one, and 

 the practice cannot be taken as having of necessity come down 

 from an early Stone Age, seeing that it might quite as well 

 have sprung up among a race possessed of metals. The sacred 

 instrument is commonly spoken of indefinitely, as lapis silex, 

 saxum silex, but it may have been a flint implement found 

 buried in the ground, for already in the ancient song of the 

 * Arval Brethren,' the thunderbolt is spoken of. as a celt {cu- 

 neus) " quom tibei cunei decstumum tonarunt,"^ and, as has 

 been shown, at least this development of the myth of the thun- 

 derbolt belongs to an age when the nature of the buried stone 

 implement has been forgotten. Yet if all we knew about the 

 matter was that victims were sacrificed with a flint on certain 

 occasions, and that the Fetiales carried these flints with them 

 into foreign countries where a treaty was to be solemnized, it 

 might be quite plausibly argued that we had here before us a 

 practice which had come down, unchanged, from the time when 

 the fathers of the Roman race used stone implements for the 

 ordinary purposes of life. This is the other side of the ar- 

 gument, which must not be kept out of sight in interpreting, 

 as a rehc of the Stone Age, the West African ceremony of 



» Liv., i. 24; XXX. 43. Grimm, D. M., p. 1171. 

 ' Zuhn, ' Herabkunft des Feuers,' p. 226. 



