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Not a few authorities contend that the earliest weapons, the most constant in all ages and continuous in all countries, were the spear and the axe. The first would be a development of the pointed hand-celt[65]; the latter of the leaf-formed or almond-shaped tool. But firstly, these would be mostly confined to countries with a well-developed Stone Age[66]; and secondly, the conversion of the hand-stone into an arme d’hast would assuredly be later than the club and the sharpened stick or stake.

Fig. 14.—Japanese War-Flail.

Fig. 15.—Turkish War-Flail.

Fig. 16.—Morning Star.

Herodotus, the father of ancient history in its modern form, a travelled student and a great genius, whose prose poem—for such it is—has proved incomparably more useful to us than any works of his successors, when describing a rock-sculpture of Sesostris-Ramses (ii. 106) makes him carry in his right hand a spear (Egyptian), and in his left a bow (Lybian or Ethiopian). Hence some writers on Hoplology have held that he considered these to be the oldest of weapons. But the ancients did not study prehistoric man beyond confounding human bones with those of extinct mammals. Augustus Cæsar was an early collector, according to Suetonius (in ‘August.’ c. xxii.). ‘Sua vero ... excoluit rebusque vetustate ac raritate notabilibus; qualia sunt Capræis immanum belluarum ferarumque membra prægrandia, quæ dicuntur gigantum ossa et arma heroum.’[67] The Emperor (whom the late Louis Napoleon so much resembled, even in the matter of wearing hidden armour[68]) preferred these curiosities to statues and pictures. The ancients also, like Marco Polo and too many of the moderns, spoke of the world generally after studying a very small part in particular. The Halicarnassian here evidently alludes to an epoch which had made notable advances upon the Quaternary Congener of the Simiads. We must return to a much earlier age. Lucretius, whose penetrating genius had a peculiar introvision, wrote like a modern scientist:—