like a bit of nature's exquisite workmanship than a simple relic of
prehistoric man. There is something very fascinating about the naif
belief that the neolithic axe is a genuine unadulterated thunderbolt.
You dig it up in the ground exactly where you would expect a thunderbolt
(if there were such things) to be. It is heavy, smooth, well shaped, and
neatly pointed at one end. If it could really descend in a red-hot state
from the depths of the sky, launched forth like a cannon-ball by some
fierce discharge of heavenly artillery, it would certainly prove a very
formidable weapon indeed; and one could easily imagine it scoring the
bark of some aged oak, or tearing off the tiles from a projecting
turret, exactly as the lightning is so well known to do in this prosaic
workaday world of ours. In short, there is really nothing on earth
against the theory of the stone axe being a true thunderbolt, except the
fact that it unfortunately happens to be a neolithic hatchet.

But the course of reasoning by which we discover the true nature of the
stone axe is not one that would in any case appeal strongly to the
fancy or the intelligence of the British farmer. It is no use telling
him that whenever one opens a barrow of the stone age one is pretty sure
to find a neolithic axe and a few broken pieces of pottery beside the
mouldering skeleton of the old nameless chief who lies there buried. The
British farmer will doubtless stolidly retort that thunderbolts often
strike the tops of hills, which are just the places where barrows and
tumuli (tumps, he calls them) most do congregate; and that as to the
skeleton, isn't it just as likely that the man was killed by the
thunderbolt as that the thunderbolt was made by a man? Ay, and a sight
likelier, too.

All the world over, this simple and easy belief, that the buried stone
axe is a thunderbolt, exists among Europeans and savages alike. In the
West of England, the labourers will tell you that the thunder-axes they
dig up fell from the sky. In Brittany, says Mr. Tylor, the old man who
mends umbrellas at Carnac, beside the mysterious stone avenues of that
great French Stonehenge, inquires on his rounds for _pierres de
tonnerre_, which of course are found with suspicious frequency in the
immediate neighbourhood of prehistoric remains. In the Chinese
Encyclopaedia we are told that the 'lightning stones' have sometimes the
shape of a hatchet, sometimes that of a knife, and sometimes that of a
m