The use of horn, like that of bone, has survived to the present day, and still appears in the handles of knives, daggers, and swords. It is of many varieties, and it fetches different prices according to the texture, the markings, and other mînutiæ known to the trade.[101]
CHAPTER III.
THE WEAPONS OF THE AGE OF WOOD: THE BOOMERANG AND THE SWORD OF WOOD; OF STONE, AND OF WOOD AND STONE COMBINED.
The Sword of Wood.
The ‘Age of Wood’ began early, lasted long, and ended late. As the practice of savages shows, the spear was originally a pointed stick hardened in the fire; and arrows, the diminutives of the spear, as daggers are of the Sword, were tipped with splinters of bamboo, whose Tabáshir or silicious bark acted like stone. The Peruvians, even after they could beat out plates of gold and silver, fought with pikes having no iron tips, but with the points hardened in the fire.[102] The same was the case with the Australians,[103] who, according to Mr. Howard Spensley,[104] also fashioned Swords of very hard wood: the Arabs of the Tihámat or Lowlands of Hazramaut (the Biblical Hazramaveth) are still compelled by poverty to use spears without metal. I pass over the general use of this world-wide material to the epoch when it afforded a true Sword.
The wooden Sword, as we see from its wide dispersion, must have arisen spontaneously among the peoples who had reached that stage of civilisation where it became necessary.[105] These weapons were found in the hands of the Indians of Virginia by the well-known Captain John Smith. Writing in 1606, Oldfield describes swords of heavy black wood in the Sandwich Islands, and Captain Owen Stansley in New Guinea. Mr. Consul Hutchinson notes the wooden swords used by the South American Itonanamas, a sub-tribe of the Maxos. Those preserved in Ireland and others brought from the Samoa Islands will be noticed in a future page. They may mostly be characterised as flat clubs sharpened at the edge, and used like our steel blades.
Fig. 33.—Lisán in Egypt and Abyssinia.
The shape of the wooden sword greatly varies, and so does its origin. Mr. Tylor fell into the mistake, so common in these classifying, generalising, and simplifying days, of deriving the sabre, because it is a cutting tool, from the axe, and the tuck or rapier from the spear because it thrusts. Wooden sword-blades alone have three prototypes, viz.:—
- The club.
- The throw-stick.
- The paddle.