f course, for primitive man, and
is far too abstract even now for nine out of ten of our
fellow-creatures. Those who don't still believe in the bodily
thunderbolt, a fearsome aerial weapon which buries itself deep in the
bosom of the earth, look upon lightning as at least an embodiment of the
electric fluid, a long spout or line of molten fire, which is usually
conceived of as striking the ground and then proceeding to hide itself
under the roots of a tree or beneath the foundations of a tottering
house. Primitive man naturally took to the grosser and more material
conception. He figured to himself the thunderbolt as a barbed arrowhead;
and the forked zigzag character of the visible flash, as it darts
rapidly from point to point, seemed almost inevitably to suggest to him
the barbs, as one sees them represented on all the Greek and Roman gems,
in the red right hand of the angry Jupiter.

The thunderbolt being thus an accepted fact, it followed naturally that
whenever any dart-like object of unknown origin was dug up out of the
ground, it was at once set down as being a thunderbolt; and, on the
other hand, the frequent occurrence of such dart-like objects, precisely
where one might expect to find them in accordance with the theory,
necessarily strengthened the belief itself. So commonly are thunderbolts
picked up to the present day that to disbelieve in them seems to many
country people a piece of ridiculous and stubborn scepticism. Why,
they've ploughed up dozens of them themselves in their time, and just
about the very place where the thunderbolt struck the old elm-tree two
years ago, too.

The most favourite form of thunderbolt is the polished stone hatchet or
'celt' of the newer stone age men. I have never heard the very rude
chipped and unpolished axes of the older drift men or cave men described
as thunderbolts: they are too rough and shapeless ever to attract
attention from any except professed archaeologists. Indeed, the wicked
have been known to scoff at them freely as mere accidental lumps of
broken flint, and to deride the notion of their being due in any way to
deliberate human handicraft. These are the sort of people who would
regard a grand piano as a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But the shapely
stone hatchet of the later neolithic farmer and herdsman is usually a
beautifully polished wedge-shaped piece of solid greenstone; and its
edge has been ground to such a delicate smoothness that it seems rather