Читать книгу The Book of the Sword - Richard Francis Sir Burton - Страница 10

FIRST USE OF METALS.

Fig. 72.—Arab Sword, with Down-curved Guillons and Saw Blade. (Musée d’Artillerie, G. 413, inscription not legible.)

We now reach the time when Man, no longer contented with the baser materials—bone and teeth, horn and wood—learned the use of metals, possibly from an accidental fire, when

... a scrap of stone cast on the flame that lit his den

Gave out the shining ore, and made the Lord of beasts a Lord of men.

Fig. 70.—Australian Spears, with bits of Obsidian, Crystal, or Glass.

Fig. 71.—Italian Poison Daggers.

The discovery of ore-smelting and metal-working, following that of fire-feeding, would enable Man to apply himself, with notably increased success, to the improvement of his weapons. But many races here stopped short. The Australian, who never invented a bow, contenting himself with the boomerang, could not advance beyond the curved and ensiform club before he was visited by the sailors of the West. His simplicity in the arts has constituted him, with some anthropologists, the living example of the primitive and prehistoric genus homo.[154] The native of New Guinea, another focus of arrested civilisation, was found equally ignorant of the metal blade. The American aborigines never taught themselves to forge either cutting or thrusting Swords; and they entertained a quasi-superstitious horror of the ‘long knife’ in the hands of the pale-faced conqueror. This is apparently the case with all the lower families of mankind, to whom the metal Sword is clean unknown. If the history of arms be the history of our kind, and if the missile be the favourite weapon of the Savage and the Barbarian, the metal Sword eminently characterises the semi-civilised, and the use of gunpowder civilised, man.

A chief named Shongo, of Nemuro, in Japan, assured Mr. John Milne[155] that, ‘in old times, when there were no cutting tools of metal, the people made them of Aji, a kind of black stone, or of a hard material called ironstone. Even now implements of this material are employed by men who dwell far in the interior.’ Here, then, is another instance of the stone and the metal ‘Ages’ overlapping, even where the latter has produced the perfection of steel-work.