origin of the faith in thunderbolts must be looked for (like the
origin of the faith in ghosts and 'psychical phenomena') far back in the
history of our race. The noble savage, at that early period when wild in
woods he ran, naturally noticed the existence of thunder and lightning,
because thunder and lightning are things that forcibly obtrude
themselves upon the attention of the observer, however little he may by
nature be scientifically inclined. Indeed, the noble savage, sleeping
naked on the bare ground, in tropical countries where thunder occurs
almost every night on an average, was sure to be pretty often awaked
from his peaceful slumbers by the torrents of rain that habitually
accompany thunderstorms in the happy realms of everlasting dog-days.
Primitive man was thereupon compelled to do a little philosophising on
his own account as to the cause and origin of the rumbling and flashing
which he saw so constantly around him. Naturally enough, he concluded
that the sound must be the voice of somebody; and that the fiery shaft,
whose effects he sometimes noted upon trees, animals, and his
fellow-man, must be the somebody's arrow. It is immaterial from this
point of view whether, as the scientific anthropologists hold, he was
led to his conception of these supernatural personages from his prior
belief in ghosts and spirits, or whether, as Professor Max Mueller will
have it, he felt a deep yearning in his primitive savage breast toward
the Infinite and the Unknowable (which he would doubtless have spelt,
like the Professor, with a capital initial, had he been acquainted with
the intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet); but this much at least
is pretty certain, that he looked upon the thunder and the lightning as
in some sense the voice and the arrows of an aerial god.

Now, this idea about the arrows is itself very significant of the mental
attitude of primitive man, and of the way that mental attitude has
coloured all subsequent thinking and superstition upon this very
subject. Curiously enough, to the present day the conception of the
thunderbolt is essentially one of a _bolt_--that is to say, an arrow, or
at least an arrowhead. All existing thunderbolts (and there are plenty
of them lying about casually in country houses and local museums) are
more or less arrow-like in shape and appearance; some of them, indeed,
as we shall see by-and-by, are the actual stone arrowheads of primitive
man himself in person. Of co