and stronger.' And having said this, he struck the hog with a flint stone."[1]
To those who read this, it will seem probable 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 (cuneus) "quom tibei cunei decstumum tonarunt,"[2] and, as has been shown, at least this development of the myth of the thunderbolt 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 argument, which must not be kept out of sight in interpreting, as a relic of the Stone Age, the West African ceremony of slaughtering the beast on the yearly sacrifice to Gimawong, not with a knife, but with a sharp stone.[3]
The examination of the evidence bearing on the Stone Age thus brings into view two leading facts. In the first place, within the limits of the Stone Age itself, an unmistakable upward development in the course of ages is to be discerned, in the traces of an early period when stone implements were only used in their rude chipped state, and were never ground or polished, followed by a later period when grinding came to be applied to improve such stone instruments as required it. And
- ↑ Liv., i. 24; xxx. 43. Cornelius Nepos; Hannibal. Grimm, D. M., p. 1171.
- ↑ Kuhn, 'Herabkunft des Feuers,' p. 226.
- ↑ A passage in Klemm, C. G., vol. iv. p. 91, relating to a Circassian practice of sacrificing with a "thunderbolt," arises from a misunderstanding. See J. S. Bell, 'Circassia,' vol. ii. pp. 93, 108.
