[57] It is not, as usually supposed, a ‘bastard French word,’ from fustis, a staff, and βάλλειν, to throw.
[58] Our ‘bow’ is the Gothic bogo (a bender?), Scand. bogi, Dan. buc, and Old Germ. poko. (Jähns, p. 18.) The ancients made fine distinctions in slings: thus the three-thonged weapon of Ægeum, Patræ, and Dymæ was held far superior to that of the Baleares (‘Slinging-Isles’), which had only one strap (Livy, xxxviii. 30).
[59] Pliny, vii. 57. The legend points to the excellent archery of the Scythians (Turanians) and the Persians.
[60] Even in modern days Dr. Woodward suggests that the first model of flint arrow-heads was brought from Babel, and was preserved after the dispersion of mankind. This is admirably archaic.
[61] The crossbow is apparently indigenous amongst various tribes of Indo-China, but reintroduced into European warfare during the twelfth century (Yule’s Marco Polo, ii. 143).
[62] The military engines of the ancients were chiefly on the torsion principle; those of the mediævals were of two types, the sling and the crossbow. The ‘tormentum’ was so called because all its parts were twisted; the ‘scorpion’ (or catapult), because the bow was vertically placed, like the insect’s raised tail; and the ‘onager,’ because the ‘wild asses, when hunted, throw the stones behind them by their kicks, so as to pierce the chests of those who pursue them, or to fracture them.’ So at least says A. Marcellinus (Hist. xxiii. 4). I cannot but suspect that Anna Comnena’s τζάγρα is a corruption of onager (Yule’s Marco Polo, ii. 144).
[63] The National Museum of Prague, Old Graben Street, now Kolowrat, contains a fine collection of war-flails, especially the huge ‘morning star’ of John Zsizka, generally called Ziska.
[64] Mostly, not always, as I learnt to my cost.
[65] In a subsequent work (Bronzes, &c., pp. 27–30) Dr. Evans discusses the suggestions of Beger and of Mr. Knight Watson (Proc. Soc. Ant. 2nd S. vii. 396) that celte in Job is a misreading for certe. He justly reprobates the fashion of writing ‘Kelt,’ and the newly-coined French plural celtæ. The truth is that not a few antiquaries have confounded the instrument with the Keltic or Celtic tribes. The word, meaning a stone axe, adze, or chisel, has been erroneously derived from the Celts, properly Kelts, and by older philologists a cælando, which would convert it into a congener of cælum. It is the Latin celtis or celtes, a chisel, possibly a relative of the Welsh cellt, a flint. The word is found, according to Mr. Evans, only in the Vulgate translation of Job, in Saint Jerome, and in a forged inscription. He first met with its antiquarian use in Beger’s Thesaurus Brandenburgicus (1696), where a metal securis (axe) is called celtes.
[66] In 1650 Sir William Dugdale (Hist. of Warwickshire) spoke of stone celts as the weapons of the Ancient Britons, and in 1766 he was followed by Bishop Lyttelton. In 1797 Mr. Frere drew the attention of the Society of Antiquaries to the Drift (palæolithic) instruments occurring at Hoxne, Suffolk, together with remains of the elephant and other extinct animals. He was one of several; but, as usually happens, the wit of one man collected and systematised the scattered experience of many. The man was M. Boucher de Perthes, whose finds in the drift-gravels of St. Acheul, near Amiens (1858), appeared in the Antiquités Celtiques et Anté-diluviennes, and made an epoch, changing the accepted chronology of mankind.