MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 835 



modifying and shaping stones to make them more effective as imple- 

 ments and weapons he began to sustain life more easily, and even to 

 acquire some luxuries. When we consider the multifarious forms of 

 stone implements and weapons and their innumerable uses, we must 

 acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Old Mother Nature for her benefi- 

 cence in placing such a very useful material in the hands of primitive 

 man. Without the indispensable mineral substances, he could have 

 progressed but little beyond the merest savagery. If the vegetable 

 kingdom supplied the first resources for the preservation of life at the 

 first emergence from the animal stage, then did the mineral kingdom 

 supply the means for the next step, the advancement to the stage of 

 improved savagery or barbarism. 



The stone as a hammer developed great possibilities in the process 

 of its evolution from the mere natural pounding implement. With 

 the birth of inventive and mechanical i:)owers, it was early modified 

 to meet various purposes by chipping and grinding into many and 

 varied forms to serve the demands of life. The hammer is still im- 

 portant as a tool, but, with all of its elaborate modifications, its rela- 

 tionship to the primitive pounding-stone can be readily traced. As 

 Prof. E. B. Tylor says in "Early History of Mankind," "Mere natural 

 stones, picked up and used without any artificial shaping at all, are 

 implements of a very low order," and yet from this lowly origin all 

 hammering implements are derived. As a missile the stone did not 

 undergo as great an evolution as the hammer in early savage life, but 

 in modern warfare the missile has become by far the most important 

 and effective weapon. 



Another most important tool, the knife, was the gift of the mineral 

 kingdom. A flint chip picked up on a hillside, where an accidentally 

 broken rock produced it, was probably the first knife. Another acci- 

 dent disclosed how it could be made, and from that start its evolution 

 was assured. The discovery of the cutting flint was a great boon to 

 primitive man. It opened up a vast field of resources, not only of 

 means for procuring necessities, but for comforts and luxuries as well. 

 As his inventive powers developed, modifications of the knife arose, 

 but at a later period, for they indicated a psychic advance considerably 

 beyond that primitive stage in which the unmodified products of 

 nature were first employed. 



While the animal world, after the vegetable, contributed greatly to 

 the maintenance and survival of primeval man, it comes next after 

 the mineral kingdom in its ability to furnish ready-made materials 

 which could be used for tools, such as bones, teeth, horn, shell, etc. 

 Bone was one of the most useful of materials to primitive man, and is 

 yet to savages. It furnished weapons and tools and lent itself readily 



