attached by means of tendon to a reed shaft. The Indians of California certainly affix their arrow-heads in a similar manner; but commonly there are notches on either side of the head at the base, to receive the sinew or split intestine, which is in the form of tape about 18 inch wide. The binding extends about an inch along the shaft, and is of the neatest description. North American[1] arrow-heads, fastened in this manner, have been engraved by Sir John Lubbock and the Rev. J. G. Wood. The end of the shaft has a shallow notch in it to receive the flint, which is cemented into the notch before being bound on.
Among the Kaffirs,[2] the iron heads of the assagais are usually bound to the shafts with strips of wet hide, which contract and tighten in drying.
The shafts of arrows are frequently of reed, in which case there is often a longer or shorter piece of solid wood joined on to the reed to which the head is attached. This is the case with the ancient Egyptian arrows, and with those of the Bushmen,[3] in which, how- ever, bone and ivory replace the wood; and the shaft generally consists of three pieces—reed, ostrich bone, and ivory, to which latter the head of iron is attached. In other cases the shafts consist of straight-growing shoots of trees. Among the Eskimos,[4] where wood is so scarce, a peculiar tool—formed of bone, with an oval or lozenge-shaped hole through it—is used for the purpose of straightening arrow-shafts. The tang of their arrow-heads is inserted in a socket, and bound fast with sinew.
For harpoons there is often a hole in the triangular armature. One of these points was found in the body of a seal killed in Iceland[5] in 1643, and Olaf Worm judiciously thought that the seal had been wounded by a Greenlander.
In most countries the shafts are feathered at the bow-string end, and such was the case in the earliest historical times. Hesiod[6] describes the arrows of Hercules as feathered from the wings of a black eagle, and Homer[7] speaks of the πτερόεντες ὀϊστοί—if indeed, as Mr. Yates suggests, this latter refers to the plumes.[8] Herodotus,[9] however, mentions, as a remarkable fact, that the arrows of the Lycians in the army of Xerxes, like those of the Bushmen and some other savages of the present day, had no
- ↑ "Preh. Times," 4th ed., p. 107. "Nat. Hist. of Man," vol. ii. p. 648.
- ↑ Wood, "Nat. Hist. of Man," vol. i. p. 103.
- ↑ Ib., vol. i. p. 284.
- ↑ One is figured in Trans. Lanc. and Chesh. Arch. Soc., vol. iv. p. 369.
- ↑ "Mus. Wormianum," 1655, p. 350.
- ↑ "Scut. Herculis," v. 134.
- ↑ "Iliad," v. 171.
- ↑ Smith's "Dict. of Ant.," p. 1002.
- ↑ Lib. vii. cap. 92.
