STONE AGE IN NEW JERSEY. 317 



split off, making it, uot a hollowed " gouge," but a smooth chisel. Fig- 

 ure 138 is such a specimen. We have gathered a large series of the 

 kind, showing that they were intended for some chisel-like use, and not 

 merely a chance variety of the ordinary cylindrical celt. 



As we jneet with no stone-work that has been fashioned by such an 

 implement, the natural inference is that they were used in connectiou 

 with wood; and no woodwork of the aborigines suggests itself other 

 than boat-building, and we have no doubt that logs were converted into 

 canoes with some stone hammers, such as we have figured in connection 

 with this chisel. It must have been a laborious process, comparing 

 the stone chisel with modern ones; but how else could figure 138 

 have been utilized ? Moreover, this view of the use of chisels is upheld 

 by Dr. Daniel Wilson.* He writes in his fascinating work : "On the 

 banks of the Scottish Clyde the modern voyager from the Old World looks 

 with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers 

 which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the 

 men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of pleasure and commerce 

 to us. The roar of the iron-forge, the clang of the trip-hammer, the inter- 

 mittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel appliances of iron-shij) 

 building, tell of the modern era of steam; but, meanwhile, underneath 

 these ver\- ship-builders' yards lie the memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, 

 in which we are borne back, up the stream of human history, far into 

 prehistoric times. The earliest recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe 

 took ])lace in 1870, at a depth of 25 feet below the surface, on a site 

 known by the apt designation of Saint Enoch's Croft, when digging the 

 foundation of a church dedicated, by a strangely apposite misnomer, to 

 the antediluvian father of Methuselah. This canoe, hewn out of a sin- 

 gle oak, rested in a horizontal position on its keel, and within it, near 

 the prow, lay a heautifulhj -finished stone ax or celt, * * * doubt- 

 less one of the simple implements icith ichich this primitive ship of the Clyde 

 had heenfashioned into shape.^^ It cannot be urged that there is no evidence 

 of " dug-out" canoes having been used in New Jersey. We know from 

 historical data that the aborigines of this section had canoes of some sort; 

 and, that some dug-outs were used, we learn from the fact that one was 

 found in Savannah River swamp, concerning which we have the follow- 

 ing:! "In 1845, while digging a canal on one of the rice-plantations on 

 the Savannah liiver, only a few miles distant from the city of Savan- 

 nah, at a depth of three feet and a half below the surface of the swamp, 

 the workmen came upon a canoe imbedded in the soil. It answered to 

 the des(!ription of what is familiarly known as a dugout, and had been 

 fashioned from the trunk of a cypress tree." If Dr. Daniel Wilson is 

 correct in considering the oak log on the Clyde as hollowed by the celt 

 found in it, which celt is analogous to ours, (see figure 2G,) then surely 

 such a chisel, with a hammer, could elfect as much with a cypress log, 

 or even the white oak, which grows to such perfection in New Jersey. 



* Prehistoric Man, 2(1 cd., p. 103. 



t Jour. Antbrop. Inst, of New York, vol. i, p. G7, 1871-72. 



