536 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tifully polished flint, chert, and jade. In the possession of the 

 writer is a granite axe-head from a dolmen in the center of France, 

 on which great pains have been spent to give it a polish. Some 

 of the flint spear-heads worked by them are marvels of labor and 

 ingenuity. A large core of flint has been taken, and out of it a 

 flake has been got which has been not only worked into a flame 

 or tonguelike shape, but has been diagonally grooved throughout 

 on one side for ornamental purposes. One such, over a foot in 

 length, of milk-white translucent flint, was found in a dolmen on 

 the Lot a few years ago. It was scooped out with forty diagonal 

 spiral lines. The labor expended upon it is incredible. This race 

 was acquainted with pottery. It did not burn its dead at first, 

 but very frequently scraped the flesh off the bones before con- 

 signing the remains to the sepulchre. The bones preserve the 

 scratches made by the flint scrapers, and they are not always cor- 

 rectly placed to form the skeleton in its tomb, a left arm being 

 sometimes put to a right shoulder ; and sometimes important 

 bones are missing. After a while bronze became known to the 

 race of the megalithic monuments. It was introduced from the 

 south; it seems to have traveled up the basin of the Po. 



In 1880 the Baron de Baye published the results of some re- 

 markable discoveries made by him in the chalk of the Marne. 

 Here he discovered a number of caves sealed up, and completely 

 untouched, that had been the sepulchres of men of the polished 

 stone age. There was much about them that was extraordinary ; 

 one feature was a rude representation of a woman, always on the 

 left side of the entrance into the sepulchral chamber. Along 

 with this woman was figured, carved in the chalk, a flint hatchet ; 

 color had been applied to distinguish the flint stone from the 

 horn handle into which it was fixed. In these mortuary caves a 

 great number of remains of human beings was found. Some of 

 the caverns were clearly family sepulchres. Some contained a 

 large number of dead who had obviously been killed in a battle. 

 But what specially concerns us now is the fact that, among the 

 skulls recovered from these caves, a certain number showed that 

 they had been trepanned, precisely as had been the skulls obtained 

 by Dr. Prunieres from the caves and dolmens of Lozere. Not 

 only so, but the dolmens of Algeria have given up skulls treated 

 in like manner, so have some found in Denmark. Obviously the 

 very unpleasant custom of cutting slices out of the skulls of some 

 of their members was continued in this race from their first ap- 

 pearance in Europe to their final disappearance in Africa. 



M. Cartailhac, in his La France prdhistorique, says : " A con- 

 siderable number of our sepulchres contain perforated human 

 skulls. The openings, without being geometrical in shape, are 

 sufficiently regular ; they approach more or less the shape of an 



