[47] Opuscula fidicularum, &c. (London: Mitchell and Hughes).
[48] Specus erant pro domibus. Caverns appear to be divisible into three classes: dwelling-places—including refuges, where, as Prometheus says (i. 452), ‘Men lived like little ants beneath the ground in the gloomy recesses of grots’—storehouses, and sepulchres. All were in Lyell’s third phase. The first was when the rock began to form the channel by dissolution; the second, when a regular river flowed; and the third, when earth and air, instead of water, filled the bed.
[49] Aristotle Darwin holds (sorrow! that we should say ‘held’): ‘Our male semi-human progenitors possessed great canine teeth,’ as is still shown by a few exceptional individuals. Hence we derived the trick of uncovering the eye-tooth when sneering or snarling at ‘Brother Man.’
[50] Quoted from Mr. Edward T. Stevens in Flint Chips; Col. A. Lane Fox (Catal. p. 158).
[51] History of the Discovery and Conquest of the Canary Islands, which dates from 1792. The unfortunate ‘master-mariner’ (see my Wanderings in West Africa, i. 116) borrows from the Spanish of Abreu-Galindo. Mr. F. W. Newman (Libyan Vocabulary: Trübner, 1882) has illustrated the four Libyan languages—the Algerian Kabáil (ancient Numidian), the Moroccan Shilhá (Mauritanian), the Ghadamsi (of which we know little), and the Tuárik (guides), or Tarkiya (Gætulian). ‘Guanche’ is a corruption of guan (Berber wan), ‘one person,’ and Chinet, or Tenerife Island; guan-chinet, meaning ‘a man of Tenerife.’ I have returned to this subject in my last book on the Gold Coast (i. chap. 5).
[52] The word, also written ‘Hüttentüt,’ and originally Dutch, is supposed to be an uncomplimentary imitation of the cluck-like or smack-like ‘sonant,’ which characterises their complicated and difficult language, and which has infected the neighbouring sections of the great South African family of speech. The Hottentots had already reached the pastoral stage when first visited by Europeans; whereas the Bushmans then, as now, were huntsmen. Some derive the Hottentot-Bushman ‘click’ from the Egyptian article T (á). But Klaproth found it in Circassia, Whitmee amongst the Melanesian Negritos, and Haldeman amongst certain North American tribes. Professor Mahaffy notices that ‘old women among us express pity by a regular palatal click.’ On the continent of Europe it expresses a kind of ‘Don’t-you-wish-you-may-get-it?’ Dr. Hahn, who has lately published a scientific work upon the Khoi-Khoi, favourably reviewed by Professor Max Müller in the Nineteenth Century, has treated the subject exhaustively.
[53] I can bear personal witness to the prowess of the ruffians of Nazareth, who call themselves, most falsely, Greeks. In 1871, when encamped near the village, three of my servants were so severely wounded with hand-stones that one was nearly killed.
[54] Prof. Maspero, of Bulak, told me that he had some doubts about the correctness of Wilkinson’s illustration showing ‘ancient Egyptians throwing knives.’
[55] The facon (faulchion) is about two feet long. Both weapons are thrown in two ways. The more common is to lay the blade flat on the palm, which is narrowed by contracting the thumb and the musculus guinearum at the root of the little finger. The other is by holding the handle and causing the dart to reverse, so as to strike point foremost. The best guard is a revolver.
[56] Critical Enquiry into Antient Armour, &c., by Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, Kt., preface, p. viii. (4to, 1842).