The most favourite form of thunderbolt is the polished stone hatchet or
'celt' of the newer stone age men. I have never heard the very rude
chipped and unpolished axes of the older drift men or cave men described
as thunderbolts: they are too rough and shapeless ever to attract
attention from any except professed archaeologists. Indeed, the wicked
have been known to scoff at them freely as mere accidental lumps of
broken flint, and to deride the notion of their being due in any way to
deliberate human handicraft. These are the sort of people who would
regard a grand piano as a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But the shapely
stone hatchet of the later neolithic farmer and herdsman is usually a
beautifully polished wedge-shaped piece of solid greenstone; and its
edge has been ground to such a delicate smoothness that it seems rather
like a bit of nature's exquisite workmanship than a simple relic of
prehistoric man. There is something very fascinating about the naif
belief that the neolithic axe is a genuine unadulterated thunderbolt.
You dig it up in the ground exactly where you would expect a thunderbolt
(if there were such things) to be. It is heavy, smooth, well shaped, and
neatly pointed at one end. If it could really descend in a red-hot state
from the depths of the sky, launched forth like a cannon-ball by some
fierce discharge of heavenly artillery, it would certainly prove a very
formidable weapon indeed; and one could easily imagine it scoring the
bark of some aged oak, or tearing off the tiles from a projecting
turret, exactly as the lightning is so well known to do in this prosaic
workaday world of ours.
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