The Chief Scout's New Dagger

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22741, 29 May 1937, Page 9 (Supplement)

The Chief Scout's New Dagger

IN celebration of his eightieth birthday the Danish Boy Scouts .sent Lord Baden-Powell a gift which may make him cry with Macbeth, "Is this a dagger which I see before me ?" A grand old warrior, familiar with all the weapons of civilisation and of the African wilds, he may be pardoned a moment's perplexity at the sight of this gift, for it is tens of thousands of years old, and of flint, states a London Journal. It must be one of the finest ever discovered, so wonderfully is it wrought. The broad blade tapers to a point: at the other ejid it is gracefully carved into a shapely handle which, hollowed to give a grip to the hand, has its extremity broad, like the top of a vase, so that it shall not slip when in use. The Stone Age man who made this weapon was a great artist in flint-carv-ing; nothing in wood, nothing moulded in steel, could bo finer or more symmetrical in design than this masterpiece of his.

He -was of the race of men Avho fought the mammoth and the mastodon in an age when returning warmth was freeing more and more land from the grip of an Ice Age. It was, perhaps, his contemporaries who left the marvellous cave paintings of the animals among which het spent his days.. Stone Age men left Britain few gems of workmanship such as this, but we have one treasure we would not exchange for anything of the sort that Europe has to offer. It was the possession of Piltdown man. Earliest Bone Tool All the world is familiar with the story of the Piltdown skull, our earliest human relic, discovered deep in the gravel, left possibly by a vanished river which cut a channel 80ft. deeper than the deposit in which Piltdown man was found, between Lewes and Crowboroush in the Sussex Weald. But the romance of it all extends beyond this skull to a wonderful tool carved ages before B-P's flint dagger. With the skull were a number of the most primitive fliuts ever hewn, of the sort first identified bv Benjamin Harrison as the work of men's hands, and called eoliths. Accompanying these was the earliest bone tool ever found. About 16in« long, 4in. wide, and 2in. thick, it is from the leg of a coloosal elephant of a species which became extinct thousands of years ago. Carved While Soft It is supposed that Piltdown man and his fellows killed and ate the animal, and that he took part of its thigh-bone to make a new tool. We know he ivorked on the bone while it was fresh, for the marrow channel is still there, and the marks show that it was carved while still soft. We can see the many cuts made at one end to form a pattern, long and free

Treasure From the Stone Age

MEN WHO FOUGHT PREHISTORIC MONSTERS

! where the tool followed the direction of the bone-fibre, short and irregular where the cuts crossed it. The other end has been carved with difficulty into a wedge-like form, like the end of a cricket bat. Here was something new and precious, but something easy to lose, so Piltdown man crowned his work by boring a hole through the bone, and a smooth groove shows where the strip of hide passed through. Alas, the hole broke, and we can see only the remaining half of it. It must have been ticklish work to bore elephant thigh-bone with only a tool of flint, but Piltdown man tried a second. Here 011 the bone is the beginning of his second boring. Ho failed to get through; perhaps he was killed before his task was accomplished. He died with his work incomplete, yet bequeathing to us a legacy telling us that he was something of an artist and inventor, 100,000 years ago, in an England he shared with lions, tigers, hyenas, mammoths, elephants, monkeys, and crocodiles. His treasure lies to-day, with the famous skull, in our Natural History Museum. BELGIAN BOY'S ADVENTURES When Louis' Govaerts was a Belgian schoolboy the Germans crashed into his country, and his grandmother took him to England for safety. « They found it in a village near Bristol, and young Louis was sent again to school. But an English school was too dull for him in those perilous days, and his grandmother was a rather stern old lady. So Louis ran away from school, and, as he was a big boy for his age, he found work in a munition factory. He sent 110 word to his grandmother, but when at last he thought it time to come back she was gone. No one could tell him where. It was said she had left England. He could find no trace of her: and there was not a letter, or a word, to say where his parents could be found. At last he gave up trying, and when the war was over went to London, and there found work, and afterwards started a business which was comfortably successful. But he never could get in touch with his lost grandmother or any member of his family, probably because he did not know the best way to set about it. He found the best way by accident. He had married an English" wife, and, having given up any expectation of finding his people again, decided to apply for naturalisation papers and become a British subject. When he did so he was astonished to find that the naturalisation authorities had a number of letters addressed to him. They had been written by members of his family as anxious to reach him as he had been to find them. Contact was made, and off M. Govaerts went to Belgium to show his English wife and his nine-year-old English son Belgium and the Belgians, the old homo and the family.