MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 337 



rine shells and beach pebbles, both used without modification or any 

 artificial preparation whatever. The beach cobbles were used for in- 

 numerable purposes — pounding, cutting by bruising, grinding, and 

 as a resource in warfare. There was no attempt at modification, and 

 if one became chipped by use so as to make an edge, it was quickly 

 discarded. The art of making implements from stones, a world-wide 

 art, never occurred to them. These stones are the same from the 

 bottom to the top, in a shell heap ninety feet in thickness, where they 

 have been accumulating shells for centuries, for the Seris seem to 

 have been the only occupants of this desert land for untold ages." 

 So here we have almost at our doors a people so low and primitive as 

 not to be possessed of tlie art of chipping stones. The older ethnol- 

 ogists declared that no people ever existed who could not chip stones, 

 but here we have a living example of such degradation. They are 

 indeed but little above their pithecanthropic ancestors. 



Perhaps the earliest effort at the modification of substances to 

 better adapt them to practical use was that of chipping stones. 

 Primitive man may have shaped sticks and bones, etc., to render them 

 more efficient, but the modified stones are the only examples that 

 have come down to us. As Tylor says, "The art of implement mak- 

 ing is in a very low stage among some tribes who use stone imple- 

 ments, who are not in the habit of grinding or polishing them. The 

 crude flint implements found in the Drift gravels of the Quarternary 

 series of strata belong to the earliest productions of human art. 

 These are very unlike the chipped implements of a comparatively 

 later period in the cremlochs of France and England. The flake 

 knives of the Drift gravels are very crude, but taken the world over 

 there is no break in the series which begins with the Drift implements 

 and ends with the beautiful specimens of Scandinavia or the obsidian 

 knives of Mexico." 



Prof. W. H. Holmes says, in "History of Flaked Stone Imple- 

 ments" (International Congress of Anthropology 1893, p. 121): "The 

 flaking of stone is a primeval art, and flaked implements are probably 

 the most ancient and elemental existing representations of human 

 handiwork. The first flake was probably made by casting one stone 

 against another, and from this primal step there was gradual progress 

 by infinitesimal advances in technique through countless ages." 



The Tasmanians, at the time of their discovery, were of the very 

 lowest of peoples, ancient or modern, and their customs and arts throw 

 much light upon the life of primitive man. Mr. H. Ling Roth, in 

 his "Aborigines of Tasmania," gives much interesting information in 

 regard to their low skill in stone chipping, but which illustrates the 

 art in primitive man. He says : "The rudely chipped flints of the 

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