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meets with no greater difficulty than that which occasionally 
arises from the disinclination of the possessor of such a stone 
to give up what he looks upon as a useful remedy for the 
sickness of himself and his neighbours ; and in many parts 
of Germany it is strongly believed that these ‘donnerkeile,’ 
as they are called, or thunderbolts, are an efficient preser- 
vative against lightning. You will see that this is a mere 
remnant of the old Thor worship amongst the Germanic 
population. The concurrent testimony of ecclesiastical and 
secular history proves to us that the Germans attached a su- 
perstitious veneration to stones; and I may mention, as the 
result of my own experience, that these ancient implements 
were frequently deposited in the cemeteries even of the latest 
Pagan race, unquestionably upon some notion of holiness at- 
tached to them. These stone flakes, which we are agreed to 
call knives, are never more usual than in the neighbourhood 
of graves of the Iron period ; and one of the surest indications 
I have had, that I was in the neighbourhood of such a ceme- 
tery, was the finding multitudes of those flint chips in the soil 
about me. On one occasion I remember, after exhuming nearly 
two hundred urns, containing chains and fibule of bronze and 
iron, I came upon a small cyst, in which were deposited a 
magnificent hammer-head of black basalt, and one of those 
fimt daggers which, I believe, are unknown in this country, 
but of which you have a specimen in the collection the King 
of Denmark sent to the Royal Irish Academy. In a similar 
way, from the cemetery at Retdorf upwards of ninety urns 
were taken, furnished with one broken dagger of silex, and 
with many hundred flint chips, not rarely deposited inten- 
tionally around the separate urns themselves. To what race 
we are to attribute the first construction of these implements, 
is still a great problem of archexology. All that we can with 
certainty say is this—that even if constructed in the earliest 
periods of human culture, they continued, for various reasons, 
to be used almost until we come to the threshold of historical 
