d by the same hands." And
throughout the palaeolithic age in Europe the very limited number and
regular succession of forms testifies to the innate conservatism of
man, and the slow progress of invention. And yet, as some American
writers have argued--who do not find that the distinction between
chipped palaeoliths and polished neoliths of an altogether later age
applies equally well to the New World--it was just as easy to have
got an edge by rubbing as by flaking. The fact remains that in the
Old World human inventiveness moved along one channel rather than
another, and for an immense lapse of time no one was found to strike
out a new line. There was plenty of sand and water for polishing, but
it did not occur to their minds to use it.

To wind up this chapter, however, I shall glance at the distribution,
not of any implement connected directly and obviously with the
utilization of natural products, but of a downright oddity, something
that might easily be invented once only and almost immediately dropped
again. And yet here it is all over the world, going back, we may
conjecture, to very ancient times, and implying interpenetrations of
bygone peoples, of whose wanderings perhaps we may never unfold the
secret. It is called the "bull-roarer," and is simply a slat of wood
on the end of a string, which when whirled round produces a rather
unearthly humming sound. Will the anthropo-geographer, after studying
the distribution of wood and stringy substances round the globe,
venture to prophesy that, if man lived his half a million years or
so over again, the bull-roarer would be found spread about very much
where it is to-day? "Bull-roarer" is just one of our local names for
what survives now-a-days as a toy in many an old-fashioned corner of
the British Isles, where it is also known as boomer, buzzer, whizzer,
swish, and so on. Without going farther afield we can get a hint of
the two main functions which it seems to have fulfilled amongst ruder
peoples. In Scotland it is, on the one hand, sometimes used to "ca'
the cattle hame." A herd-boy has been seen to swing a bull-roarer of
his own making, with the result that the beasts were soon running
frantically towards the byre. On the other hand, it is sometimes
regarded there as a "thunner-spell," a charm against thunder, the
superstition being that like cures like, and whatever makes a noise
like thunder will be on good terms, so to speak, with the real thunder.

As regar