232 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
of knowledge garnered in them all during the last quarter of a 
century, at the end of a single address, would be sheer folly. My 
remarks will therefore be restricted to a few points in the general 
aspect of Anthropology, in harmony with those I have already 
ventured to lay before you. 
The tendency to assign strange and apparently unaccountable 
phenomena to supernatural causes appears to have been a feature 
common to all past civilisations. To this category were- relegated, 
in early historical times, many of the industrial products of the 
previous and less civilised races. The Greeks and Eomans took 
particular notice of the polished stone hatchets which were then, as 
now, occasionally picked up in the fields and other odd places. 
Unable to account for their production on any other hypothesis, 
they regarded them as thunderbolts (ceraunia)^ and professed to 
find them wherever lightning was seen to strike the earth; and 
hence they came to be used as charms and talismans, to which 
extraordinary virtues were attributed. Some variant of the popular 
belief so long prevalent in this country, that flint arrow-heads were 
the missiles of elves or fairies, was widely spread throughout the 
world. Equally persistent and widespread was the idea that these 
stone objects were possessed of the property of healing diseases and 
averting threatened calamities, such as the evil-eye and other 
imaginary ills. Dr Bellucci, of Perugia, in his well-known Cata- 
logue of Italian Amidets^ has tabulated, under the heading Pierres 
de foudre^ twenty arrow-heads and thirty stone axes which had 
been used as charms throughout the country. Among the curiosities 
imported into Europe, after the geographical discoveries of the 
15th century had opened up the JSiew World to research, were 
stone implements, such as axes, chisels, arrow-points, knives, &c., 
found actually in use among various primitive people. This was 
the first clue to the true function of the so-called Ceraunia and 
Pierres de foudre of the ancients. In 1723 we find Jussieu sug- 
gesting, at the Aeademie des Sciences, that the Pierres de foudre 
were the implements of a savage people who lived in Europe in 
earlier times. But it remained to the newborn science of Anthropo- 
logy to give the coup de grace to this kind of superstition. 
Another of its more immediate results was a complete explanation 
of the curious custom which preserved the use of stone weapons in 
