[75] Col. A. Lane Fox (Prim. War., p. 24) notices the bone implements of the French caves and their resemblance, amounting almost to identity, with those found in Sweden, among the Eskimos, and the savages of Tierra del Fuego.
[76] Mittheilungen der Wien. Anthrop. Gesellschaft. Vienna, 1874.
[77] Pfahlbau (pfahl = palus) was originally applied to the pile-villages of the Swiss waters (The Lake-Dwellings of Switzerland, by Dr. Ferdinand Keller).
[78] Wilkinson opines that the Egyptian Khons or Khonsu, the new moon of the year which appeared at the autumnal equinox when the ‘world was made,’ becomes the Biblical Sem, and that ‘Sampson’ is Sem-Kon, or Sun-fire. Jablonski (Pantheon Egyptiorum) supported the theory that Son, Sem, Con, Khons, or Djom was the god or genius of the summer sun.
[79] Travels into Indo-China, &c. ii. 147, by Henri Mouhot, 1858–59.
[80] ‘Pile,’ applied to the arrow-head (as ‘quarrel’ to the bolt of the crossbow), is a congener of the German pfeil, an arrow. The Scandinavian is pila, the Anglo-Saxon pil, apparently a congener of the Latin pilum.
[81] Ulster Journal of Archæology for 1857.
[82] The Dacota tribe is said still to ‘doctor’ the bullet by filling with venom four drilled holes, which are covered by pressing down the projecting lips or rims of the metal. Unfortunately, travellers tell us that the venom is the cuticle of the cactus, which is quite harmless. The Papuans tip their arrows with a human bone, which is poisoned by being thrust into a putrid corpse. Hence, they say, Commodore Goodenough met his death.
[83] P. 258, Descriptive Catalogue of the Antiquities in the Royal Irish Academy, by the late (Sir) William R. Wilde. The Greeks, from the days of Homer, followed by the Romans, considered the use of poisoned arrows a characteristic of the barbarian.
[84] The learned author adds, ‘thus confirming the opinion (deduced from the size of the hafts of our bronze Swords) that the hands of the race who used them were very small.’ I can hardly agree with him, and will give reasons in a future page.