[37] Boutell (Arms and Armour, fig. 61, p. 269) engraves a parrying weapon with a blade at right angles to the handle. He calls it a ‘Moorish Adargue’ (fifteenth century). The latter word (with the r) is simply the Arabic word el-darakah, a shield, the origin of our ‘targe’ and ‘target.’ The adaga (not adarga, cantos i. 87, viii. 29) with which Camoens in The Lusiads (ii. 95, &c.) arms the East Africans is a weapon of the Mádu kind. I have translated it ‘dag-targe,’ because in that part of the world it combines poniard and buckler. The savage and treacherous natives of the Solomon Islands (San Christoval, &c.) still use a nondescript weapon, half Sword and half shield, some six feet long.
[38] Captain Speke’s Dictionary of the Source of the Nile, p. 652 (Edinburgh: Blackwoods, 1863).
[39] In the form called Manchette, or cutting at hand, wrist, and forearm with the inner edge. It is copiously described in iv. 45–54 of my New System of Sword Exercise, &c. (London: Clowes, 1876).
[40] Primitive Warfare, p. 24.
[41] Sir Charles Lyell, Geological Evidences of Antiquity of Man, p. 13 (London: Murray, 1863). Dr. W. Lauder Lindsay (Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot. vol. v. p. 327) says of the Maori tokis or stone-hatchets, they were used chiefly for cutting down timber and for scooping canoes out of the trunks of forest trees; for driving posts for huts; for grubbing up roots, and killing animals for food; for preparing firewood; for scraping the flesh from the bones when eating, and for various other purposes in the domestic arts. But they were also employed in times of war as weapons of offence and defence, as a supplementary kind of tomahawk.
[42] The French sarbacane, the Italian and Spanish cerbotana, the Portuguese gravatana, and the German Blasrohr (blow-tube) is, according to Demmin (p. 468), arbotana, or rather carpicanna, derived from ‘Carpi,’ the place of manufacture, and the Assyrian (Kane), Greek and Latin κάννα (canna), whence ‘cannon.’ This tube, spread over three distinct racial areas in Southern Asia, Africa, and America, is used either for propelling clay balls or arrowlets, poisoned and unpoisoned. It is the sumpitan of Borneo, where Pigafetta (1520) mentions reeds of this kind in Cayayan and Palavan Islands. The hollow bamboo is still used by the Laos of Siam, and is preserved among the Malagasy as a boyish way of killing birds. Père Bourieu notes it among the Malaccan negrito aborigines, whom the Moslem Malays call ‘Oran-Banua’ (men of the woods); the weapon they term tomeang. It is known in Ceylon, in Silhet, and on both sides of the Bay of Bengal. Condamine describes it among the Yameos (South American Indians); Waterlow and Klemm, in New Guinea, and Markham among the Uapes and other tribes on the Amazonas head-waters. In the New World it is of two varieties: the long heavy zarabatana, and the thinner, slighter pucuna. Finally, it has degraded to the ‘pea-shooter’ of modern Europe. The principal feature of the weapon is the poisoned dart; it is therefore unknown amongst tribes who, like the Andamanese, have not studied toxics (Journ. Anthrop. Inst. p. 270, February 1882).
[43] See the hamus ferreus pointed at both ends in Demmin (p. 124); and the German Fussängel (p. 465). The larger caltrop was called tribulus, stylus or stilus (Veget. De Re Mil. iii. 24). The knights of mediæval Europe planted their spurs rowels upwards to serve the same purpose.
[44] ‘Make your hand perfect by a third attempt,’ said Timocrates in Athenæus, i. cap. 4.
[45] ‘Hitherto,’ remarks Colonel A. Lane Fox, ‘Providence operates directly on the work to be performed by means of the living animated tool; henceforth it operates indirectly on the progress and development of creation, first through the agency of the instinctively tool-using savage, and, by degrees, of the intelligent and reasoning man.’
[46] J. F. Rowbotham: ‘Certain reasons for believing that the Art of Music, in prehistoric times, passed through three distinct stages of development, each characterised by the invention of a new form of instrument; and that these stages succeeded one another in the same order in various parts of the world’ (Journ. Anthrop. Inst. May 1881). The author states that the Veddahs (properly Vædiminissu, or ‘sportsmen’) of Ceylon, the Mincopis (Andamans), and the people of Tierra del Fuego ‘have no musical instruments at all.’