. The ancient stone implements, weapons, and ornaments, of Great Britain. Lib. vii. cup. 69. § Iliad, xiii. 650. \\ I bid., v. 393. THEIR VARIOUS FORMS. 329 Even among such, rude tribes as the Massagetae and Scythians,the arrow-heads, in the days of Herodotus, were of bronze ; and herecords an ingenious method adopted by one Ariantas,* a king ofthe Scythians, to take a census of his people by levying anarrow-head from each, all of which were afterwards melted andcast into an enormous bronze vessel. Besides the ^Ethiopians there was another nation which madeuse of stone-pointed arrows in Africa
. The ancient stone implements, weapons, and ornaments, of Great Britain. Lib. vii. cup. 69. § Iliad, xiii. 650. \\ I bid., v. 393. THEIR VARIOUS FORMS. 329 Even among such, rude tribes as the Massagetae and Scythians,the arrow-heads, in the days of Herodotus, were of bronze ; and herecords an ingenious method adopted by one Ariantas,* a king ofthe Scythians, to take a census of his people by levying anarrow-head from each, all of which were afterwards melted andcast into an enormous bronze vessel. Besides the ^Ethiopians there was another nation which madeuse of stone-pointed arrows in Africa, as is proved by the arrowsfrom Egyptian tombs, of which specimens are preserved in severalof our museums. The head, which is of flint, differs, however, fromall the ordinary forms, inasmuch as it is chisel-shaped rather thanpointed, and in form much resembles a small gun-flint. The tipof one of these, secured to the shaft by bitumen, is shown inFig. 272. The original is in the British Museum. It is pro-bable that arrow-heads of similar character may have been in use. Fig. in Britain, though they have hitherto almost escaped observation,owing to the extreme simplicity of their form. To these I shallsubsequently recur. The better-known forms which occur in Britain may be classedas the leaf-shaped, the lozenge-shaped, the tanged or stemmed,and the triangular, several varieties. The arrow-heads of the third class are in this country usually barbed ; thoseof the fourth but rarely. Whether the forms were successively developed in this order isa question difficult of solution ; but in an ingenious paper by C. Little, of Liberton, being An Inquiry into the Expedientsused by the Scots before the Discovery of Metals, f publishedearly in this century, the lozenge-shaped are regarded as theearliest; next, those barbed with two witters, $ but no middle * iv. 81. t Archaologia Scotica, vol. i. p. 389. + Thi* word, still in use in Scotland for the barbs of
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