[817] Yet soldering iron was known to Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty.
[818] The position may be seen in life all over India, where the jugglers teach goats to stand and be hoisted in that position.
[819] The Etruscans, however, like the Jews, disposed the feet of the corpse eastward, as told in Etruscan Bologna (p. 22). Although the author should not say so, the public has not done wisely to neglect this book; its most valuable part, the osteological details of the Etruscan, deserved a better fate and, perhaps, secured a failure. Yet it had the prime advantage of angry abuse by a certain critical journal, whose predilection for the commonplace (quâ commonplace) is expressed by vituperation of all that is not commonplace. In my case I may say of it with Diderot: ‘Perhaps they do me more credit than I deserve; I should feel humiliated if those who speak ill of so many clever and worthy people took it into their heads to speak well of me.’
[820] See ‘Analysis of Mycenæan Metals’ (pp. 367–376, Mycenæ.) But the book is almost as self-contradictory as Troy.
[821] For instance, by Mr. W. J. Stillman, a traveller and a scholar. In the New York Nation (August 18) he writes on ‘The True Age of the Mykenæ Finds’; and, after a fresh examination, he declares the objects post-classical, ‘probably representing the burial-place of a colony of Celts between the fifth and the second century b.c.’ What chiefly militates against this theory is the cremation of the human remains.
[822] Dictionaries derive this word from σπάω (to draw). I find it in the Egyptian ‘Sft.’ It is evidently a congener of Σπάθη (dim. σπάθιον), also Romaic, and verb σπαθάω = I wield (the weapon). Spáthe means primarily a broad blade of wood or metal; secondarily a weaver’s spatel or spaddle, a spatula (Latin tela); an oar-blade, a scraper (for horse-currying), and a broadsword. Scotchmen still apply ‘spathe’ to the weaver’s lath (The Past in the Present, p. 11), which preceded the ‘pecten.’ It is also used for Carnifex in Tertullian (De Cult. Fem. cap. xiii.), and in botany for a shoot of fructification. In Anglo-Saxon it became Spad; Icelandic Spadi, our spade. The Latins (Tacit. Ann. xii. 35; Veget. De Re Mil. ii. 15) converted it to spatha; and hence the neo-Latin espée and épée, espada and spada, from which we derive our (suit of) ‘spades.’ See the play of words upon ‘Metal de Espadas’ in Camoens’ ‘Rejected Stanzas’ (canto iv. vol. ii. p. 437 of my translation). It has been subjected to other corruptions; and in Chaucer (Knightes T. 1662) ‘Sparth’ is a battle-axe:—
‘He hath a sparth of twenti pound of wighte.’
Even the learned Major Jähns derives ‘Spatha’ from ‘Spatel.’
[823] Quoted by Colonel A. Lane-Fox, Anthrop. Coll. p. 174.
[824] I have described it in Scoperte Antropologiche in Ossero (Trieste, 1877). The point is evidently broken off.