ARCHAEOLOGY. 379 



Two small axes of the same material are fixed to bifurcated liandles. 

 Five chisels of stone, still connected with buckhorn handles, present 

 some varieties of form. Two of them, very like modern instruments 

 of the same kind, have a blade of only five or six lines in width and 

 a total length of from thirty-seven lines to five inches. The other 

 two are shorter and wider, having at the end of the handle furthest 

 from the blade a cylindrical bit of wood, the evident use of which 

 had been to allow the hammer to be used without injury to the buck- 

 horn. Two handles of this last kind preserve each a stone, the edge 

 of which in a very decided segment of a circle can scarcely have 

 served but as a mere knife for cutting through slight or soft articles. 

 The imperfection of these rudely contrived tools might make one 

 doubt their antiquity were not the circumstances under which they 

 were discovered an abundant guarantee on that head. It is to be 

 remarked that many of the stones which are still furnished with their 

 handles penetrate but a little way into the buckhorn, and are rea- 

 dily taken out of the kind of socket which holds them. But as that 

 slightness of adherence essentially results from the action of time, it 

 is not an absolute characteristic of authenticity, for six of the pieces 

 described above still preserve so great a strength of cohesion that 

 the stones cannot be removed but with great efibrt. 



Some of the buckhorns are armed with punches of vegetable mate- 

 rial, the conical form of which is very greatly altered by desicca- 

 tion. An axe handle is traversed lengthwise by a piece of wood 

 broken at its thicker extremity and terminating in a point at the 

 other. A cylinder twelve lines high by an inch in diameter and 

 another buckhorn of egg shape serve as handles to wooden punches 

 or bodkins. Two of these punches or bodkins and eight handles of 

 this latter kind were also found, three of the latter being in an 

 unfinished state. 



Out of six buckhorn hammers, pierced transversely^ with a square 

 or oval aperture, five have still attached to them the remains of their 

 fir wood handles. Two of those hammers have at one of their 

 extremities a cavity, in which we suppose a stone was sometimes 

 fastened; and it is very possible that in some cases this was even 

 sharpened into an axe. 



Eight arrow points in hone, very like punches, bear traces of a 

 blackish mastic and of fine ligatures. One of these has still attached 

 to it a small fragment of its shaft, and shows, at the point of fracture 

 of the mastic, a line of very small holes, formerly filled with the 

 ligatures that bound the two pieces together. Among the relics in 

 bone which must have been similarly used is a fragment of the inner 

 bone, or tibia, of a leg, the cavity once filled by the marrow serving 

 for the shaft-socket. Numerous staghorns have been used as handles. 

 Six end pieces of antlers have at their thicker extremity a hollow which 

 imitates the form of the stone article used as a cutting knife. One 

 antler bears the impress of a flat instrument which had penetrated 

 two inches deep into the handle; and in another similar article the 

 cavity gives the form of the punch; finalh', the cavity of one of these 

 crooked handles resembles the socket of an incisor tooth of a rumi- 



