Notwithstanding these difficulties, we are able to catch glimpses of evidence, here and there, which, when put together systematically, and when the vestiges of antiquity are illustrated by the implements of existing savages, will, I trust, be found sufficient to warrant the principles for which I contend.
In the earliest ages of mankind, when all men were warriors, and before the division of labour, consequent on civilization, had separated the arts of peace and war into distinct professions, we must expect to find the same implement frequently employed in the capacity of both tool and weapon. Even long after the very earliest ages of which we have any historical or archaeological record, we often find a combination of tool and weapon in the same forms, especially amongst those semi-civilized and savage races of our own times, whom we regard as the representatives of antiquity. The battles of liberty, from the age of the Jews and Philistines down to the time of the last Hungarian revolution, have always been fought by the subject people with weapons made out of the implements of husbandry. We read in the first of Samuel, chapter xiii, ‘Now there was no smith found in all the land of Israel: for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears: but all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share’ (the blade of the ploughshare), ‘and his coulter’ (a kind of knife), ‘and his ax, and his mattock’ (a kind of pickaxe).... ‘So it came to pass, in the day of battle, that there was neither sword nor spear found in the hand of any of the people that were with Saul and Jonathan.’ In the revolts of the German peasantry, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the bands of insurgents armed themselves with threshing flails and scythe blades. In 1794 and 1831, the Polish peasantry were similarly armed[127]; and it was from such implements of husbandry that weapons like the military flail, the bill, and the yataghan, derived their origin. In the recent outbreak in Jamaica (which, had it not been ably and powerfully put down, would have led to the destruction of the whole white population) the negroes armed themselves with weapons of husbandry. In the proclamation of Paul Bogle, he says: ‘Every one of you must leave your house, take your guns; who don’t have guns, take cutlasses.’ The cutlasses here referred to were the implements used for cutting the sugar-cane, sharp on the concave edge, and are the same which, having been used as weapons by the negroes in their own country, have continued to be employed by them ever since. In like manner, we learn from Symes’s ‘Embassy to Ava in 1795’,[128] that the Burmese use the sabre both for warlike purposes, as well as for cutting bamboos, felling timber, &c.; it is the constant companion of the inhabitants for all purposes, and they never travel without it. In Borneo, the peculiar sword-like weapon, called the ‘parangilang’, is used both as a weapon, and also for felling trees, and the axe of this country is constructed so that, by turning it on the helve, it can be used either as a weapon or as a carpenter’s axe. In like manner, the Kaffir axe-blade, by simply altering its position in the handle, is used either as a weapon, or for tilling the ground. The North American Indian tomahawk, like the Kaffir axe, is used for many different purposes; the spear-head of the Kaffir assegai is the knife that is used for all purposes of manufacture, and Captain Grant says that the Watusi of East Central Africa make all their baskets with their spear-heads.[129] The weapons edged with sharks’ teeth, to which I referred in my former paper, are used in the Marquesas and other of the South Sea Islands, as much for cutting up fish and carcasses as for warlike purposes.[130] Dr. Klemm, in his valuable work on savage and early weapons, describes the wooden pick used by the inhabitants of New Caledonia both as a weapon, and also for tilling the ground,[131] and he gives reasons for supposing[132] that in Egypt and many other parts of the world, the form of the plough was originally derived from that of the hatchet or hoe, used for tilling purposes. The hoe used in East Central Africa, which also, like the Kaffir axe, serves as a medium of exchange in lieu of money, evidently derived its form from that of a spear or arrow head. The spade, formerly used in this country, and represented in old pictures, which is still used as a shovel in Ireland, is a pointed spear-like instrument, and the ‘loy’ or spade still used in all parts of Ireland is hafted exactly in the same manner as the bronze celt of prehistoric times. Dr. Klemm (l. c., p. 119) gives an illustration of an axe used by the Norwegian peasants both as a tool and weapon.