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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.