POPULAR SCIENCE 



SCRATCHES ON FLINTS. By J. Reid Moir, F.R.A.I. 

 Rocks exhibiting scratches upon one or other of their surfaces 

 occur in many gravels and other deposits in this country. The 

 Boulder Clays of glacial origin contain numerous examples of 

 such specimens, and the rocky floors and sides of valleys in 

 mountainous districts, which were at one time glaciated, very 

 frequently exhibit well-marked groovings or striae due to the 

 pressure of moving ice with stones embedded in it. In some 

 districts, too, numerous examples of striated flints occur upon 

 the surface of the ground. The author proposes, in this article, 

 to confine his remarks solely to the scratches developed upon 

 flints, though it is possible that the facts to be described may 

 be more or less applicable also to the striae to be observed upon 

 rocks of a different character. 



So far as can be ascertained, no attempt has up to the present 

 been made by scientific men to examine critically the details 

 and characteristics of the striations which are developed upon 

 the surfaces of many fractured flints . 



In 1910, however, Dr. Allen Sturge published in the Proceed- 

 ings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia a very exhaustive 

 and able paper ("The Chronology of the Stone Age," vol. i. 

 part 1 ) in which he described and illustrated a number of striated 

 flints found upon the surface of the ground in N.W. Suffolk. 

 This paper, which contained the somewhat startling suggestion 

 that several minor glaciations occurred during the neolithic 

 or latest phase of the stone age, stimulated the present author 

 to investigate a large number of striated flints from different 

 deposits, and to conduct a series of experiments in which flints 

 were scratched by artificial means. 1 The results of these ex- 

 periments form the ground-work of the present article, but 

 before describing them it appears desirable to consider the 

 various ways in which a fractured flint may be scratched by 



1 For a brief account of this investigation see Man, vol. xiv. No. u, November 

 1914. 



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