[Footnote 217: It is not meant that stone implements did not continue to be used in some parts of Europe far into the Middle Ages. But this was not because iron was not perfectly well known, but because in many backward regions it was difficult to obtain or to work, so that stone continued in use. As my friend, Mr. T. S. Perry, reminds me, Helbig says that stone-pointed spears were used by some of the English at the battle of Hastings, and stone battle-axes by some of the Scots under William Wallace at the end of the thirteenth century. _Die Italiker in der Poebene_, Leipsic, 1879, p. 42. Helbig's statement as to Hastings is confirmed by Freeman, _Norman Conquest of England_, vol. iii. p. 473.] [Footnote 218: My use of the word "inventing" is, in this connection, a slip of the pen. Of course the tales of "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," the Sciopedae, etc., as told by Sir John Mandeville, were not invented by the mediaeval imagination, but copied from ancient authors. They may be found in Pliny, _Hist. Nat._, lib. vii., and were mentioned before his time by Ktesias, as well as by Hecataeus, according to Stephanus of Byzantium. Cf. Aristophanes, _Aves_, 1553; Julius Solinus, _Polyhistor_, ed. Salmasius, cap. 240. Just as these sheets are going to press there comes to me Mr. Perry's acute and learned _History of Greek Literature_, New York, 1890, in which this subject is mentioned in connection with the mendacious and medical Ktesias:--These stories have probably acquired a literary currency "by exercise of the habit, not unknown even to students of science, of indiscriminate copying from one's predecessors, so that in reading Mandeville we have the ghosts of the lies of Ktesias, almost sanctified by the authority of Pliny, who quoted them and thereby made them a part of mediaeval folk-lore--and from folk-lore, probably, they took their remote start" (p. 522).] [Footnote 219: "En that var gravara ok safvali ok allskonar skinnavara" (Rafn, p. 59),--i. e. gray fur and sable and all sorts of skinwares; in another account, "skinnavoeru ok algra skinn," which in the Danish version is "skindvarer og aegte graaskind" (id. p. 150),--i. e. skinwares and genuine gray furs. Cartier in Canada and the Puritans in Massachusetts were not long in finding that the natives had good furs to sell.] [Footnote 220: Rafn, p. 156.]