ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. IGl 



pointed flake of flint. A flint flake too small for the hand is made 

 effective by fixing it to a piece of wood, making a knife or dagger. 

 A heavier sharp-edged fragment secured to a handle adapting it for 

 striking, becomes the axe or hatchet. What immediate incidents 

 or needs led to any of these combinations, I do not propose to 

 guess. It is enough to have shown that at a period when man was 

 as yet unlearned in respect to any dressing of stone beyond knock- 

 ing off rude splinters from a rock, he may have had in his posses- 

 sion the means to produce, and was fully capable of producing, such 

 implements and weapons as I have named. This being true, the 

 same wants which might at any period of his history have led to 

 their production may without violence be presumed to have done so 

 then. They are in the line of his acquired arts, and the necessary 

 links between these and the arts he is yet to acquire. 



Whether these various combinations were made prior to actual 

 working of flint it would be idle to speculate. It is more likely that 

 neither preceded the other. While man was finding out how to use 

 his possessions by bringing them together in new combinations, he 

 was naturally improving them all. Having found the flint and 

 other rocks of similar texture so far obedient to his power that they 

 could be shattered, and new and useful forms produced, having ac- 

 quired uses for these forms, having learned the purposes to which a 

 sharp edge could be applied, and that a fresh one could be pro- 

 duced by knocking off the dulled one — it followed in due course, 

 from experience, to form the new edge with less violent blows, with 

 more judgment and dexterity, and, as the advantage of special forms 

 became apparent, with a view to bringing it as close as possible to 

 such forms. And all this time the old art of reducing by abrasion 

 had not been lost; applying it now to the stone as finer and finer 

 chipping suggested and provoked the desire for a smoother edge, 

 the celt appeared, polished at first on its edge only, afterwards on 

 its entire surface. There was no dividing line between the pale- 

 olithic and neolithic ages. If separated at all, it is by a broad zone 

 through which the implements of both are found side by side. 

 Neither was there any step from the finished celt to the hafted im- 

 plement. The essential step, that of securing a stone in some form 

 to a handle, had been taken long ago. 



Lest it might be suggested that in order to sustain a theory regard- 

 ing the developement of the arts, I have myself been led to invent 

 steps in art that were never known to man, it is worth while to remark 

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