While bone was extensively used by primitive Man, horn was the
succedaneum in places where it was plentiful. The Swiss lake-dwellings
have yielded stag’s horn and wooden hafts or helves, with bored holes
and sockets; borers, awls or drills; mullers, rubbers, and various
other instruments. The caverns of the Reindeer period in the south of
France are not less rich. Stag-horn axes are common in Scandinavia,
and one preserved by the Stockholm Museum bears the spirited outline
of a deer. Beads, buttons, and other ornaments are found in England.
This material, when taken from the old stag, is of greater density
than osseous matter and of almost stony hardness, as the cancellated
structure contains carbonate of lime; moreover it was easily worked by
fire and steam.
[Heading: _THE ‘HORN-AGE.’_]
Diodorus (iii. cap. 15) describes the Ichthyophagi as using antelopes’
horns in their fishing, ‘for need teacheth all things.’ The earliest
mention of a horn-arm is by Homer (‘Iliad,’ ii. 827, and iv. 105),
who describes Pandarus, the Lycian, son of Lycaon, using a bow made
of the six-spans-long[90] spoils of the ‘nimble mountain-goat.’ The
weapon may have retained the original form. The early Greek types
were either simple or composite. The Persians[91] preferred, and till
lately used, wood and horn, stained, varnished, and adorned as much as
possible. Duarte Barbosa[92] describes the Turkish bow at Hormuz Island
as ‘made of buffalo-horn and stiff wood painted with gold and very
pretty colours.’ The ‘Hornboge’ occurs in the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ and the
Hungarians appeared in Europe with horn-bows and poisoned arrows.
The bows of the Sioux and Yutahs are of horn, backed with a strip of
raw hide to increase the spring. The Blackfoot bow is made from the
horn of the mountain-sheep (Catlin), and the Shoshone of the Rocky
Mountains shape it by heating and wetting the horn, which is combined
with wood (Schoolcraft). The Eskimos of Polar America, where nothing
but drift-timber is procurable, are compelled to build their weapons
with several bits of wood, horn, and bone, bent into form by smoking or
steaming.
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