s, though the sketch would
probably much resemble the picture of a muchness, so admirably described
by the mock turtle. The excellent Tollius himself, however, while
demurring on the whole to this hypothesis of the philosophers, bases his
objection mainly on the ground that, if this were so, then it is odd the
thunderbolts are not round, but wedge-shaped, and that they have holes
in them, and those holes not equal throughout, but widest at the ends.
As a matter of fact, Tollius has here hit the right nail on the head
quite accidentally; for the holes are really there, of course, to
receive the haft of the axe or hammer. But if they were truly
thunderbolts, and if the bolts were shafted, then the holes would have
been lengthwise, as in an arrowhead, not crosswise, as in an axe or
hammer. Which is a complete _reductio ad absurdum_ of the philosophic
opinion.

Some of the cerauniae, says Pliny, are like hatchets. He would have been
nearer the mark if he had said 'are hatchets' outright. But this
_apercu_, which was to Pliny merely a stray suggestion, became to the
northern peoples a firm article of belief, and caused them to represent
to themselves their god Thor or Thunor as armed, not with a bolt, but
with an axe or hammer. Etymologically Thor, Thunor, and thunder are the
self-same word; but while the southern races looked upon Zeus or Indra
as wielding his forked darts in his red right hand, the northern races
looked upon the Thunder-god as hurling down an angry hammer from his
seat in the clouds. There can be but little doubt that the very notion
of Thor's hammer itself was derived from the shape of the supposed
thunderbolt, which the Scandinavians and Teutons rightly saw at once to
be an axe or mallet, not an arrowhead. The 'fiery axe' of Thunor is a
common metaphor in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Thus, Thor's hammer is itself
merely the picture which our northern ancestors formed to themselves,
by compounding the idea of thunder and lightning with the idea of the
polished stone hatchets they dug up among the fields and meadows.

Flint arrowheads of the stone age are less often taken for thunderbolts,
no doubt because they are so much smaller that they look quite too
insignificant for the weapons of an angry god. They are more frequently
described as fairy-darts or fairy-bolts. Still, I have known even
arrowheads regarded as thunderbolts, and preserved superstitiously
under that belief. In Finland, stone arrows are universall