446 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1896. 



form by chipping, as was frequently done with similar implements, 

 especially with Hint, and of which plate 30 furnishes an excellent illus- 

 tration. The implement (in plate 31) was reduced to shape by grind- 

 ing or rubbing and not by chipping. The grinding of an object of this 

 size from its original condition of bowlder or ledge rock into the 

 symmetrical weapon here shown must have required immense labor. 

 This work would be long, arduous, tedious, and difficult, and would 

 require of the workman great tenacity of purpose and fearlessness 

 of fatigue. We have no means of knowing the difference between 

 the amount of labor required to make the implement in plate 31 and 

 that shown in the frontispiece, but it may be surmised, for the purpose 

 of argument, that the same amount of exertion, time, and labor ex- 

 pended on the latter would have made a hundred of the first. Yet the 

 implement thus laboriously made is, for all utilitarian purposes, no 

 better than any one of the hundred which could have been made in the 

 same time. Indeed, it is hardly so- good, for, being of stone, it is heavier 

 and, as the blade can not be taken out of the handle, it is more unwieldy 

 and troublesome to carry. The only reason apparent that impelled 

 j)rimitive man to make this imxdement with an expenditure of so much 

 more force than would have been required for the commoner specimen, 

 was the gratification of his a-sthetic taste. In order to gratify it, he 

 was willing to expend this extra force. This implement is, therefore, an 

 illustration of what is found to be true in thousands of other objects — 

 that their makers were willing to endure fatigue and labor long con- 

 tinued, in order to gratify their desire for the beautiful. And in pro- 

 portion as this is true, so did he not proceed along the lines of least 

 resistance, but rather in defiance of the rule. 



Drilling in Stone. 



This was oub of the arts of prehistoric man during the Neolithic 

 l)eriod. It was continued into tlie Bronze age and thence down to 

 historic times. It is so difficult in performance, and yet was so suc- 

 cessfully performed, as to entitle it to a place among the fine arts. 

 Ordinary drilling performed in a common or clumsy manner might not 

 be entitled to such mention, and the art obtains the right to be classed 

 as fine, only from the number of wonderful specimens Avhich have 

 been found, the difficulty incident to the performance, and the success 

 attending it. Scores of examples can be given from both Europe and 

 America in which the drilling shown is at once delicate and difficult. 

 In America the prehistoric man desiring to make an ax made a groove 

 around it and handled it by a withe. His European brother of the 

 same i)eriod drilled a hole in his ax and inserted a handle after the 

 fashion of the sledge. He appeared, in both hemisi>heres, to be master 

 of the art of drilling, for, contrary to the way of the white man, he 

 made the implement perfect and complete, even to its smoothing and 

 polishing, before he began to drill the hole. As said in the chapter on 



