6o ABORIGINAL DESIGNATIONS FOR STONE IMPLEMENTS. 



THE ABORIGINAL DESIGNATIONS FOR 

 STONE IMPLEMENTS. 



By Fritz Noetling, M.A., Ph.D., etc, 



(Read October 12th, 1908.) 



Quite in the commencement of my studies of the 

 stone implements manufactured by the Tasmanian 

 Aborigines, I noticed that the Southern tribes had a 

 special word for that particular rock which is generally,, 

 though wrongly, called " Black Flint." Considering the 

 popular, though wrong, use of the word " Flint," by 

 Which the word originally applied to the rock from 

 which a stone implement is made is used to designate the 

 implement made therefrom, the question naturally arose 

 whether this particular native word meant the imple- 

 ment or the substance (rock) from which it was made. 

 At the first glance this seems immaterial and 'hair-split- 

 ting; but on closer examination it will be seen that the 

 question is a most important one. If this particular 

 word is only used to describe a special implement, it 

 would conclusively prove that the Aborigines inten- 

 tionally manufactured implements of a certain shape, 

 which they distinguished by a special name from all the 

 others. If, on the other hand, this word repre- 

 sented the designation of a particular kind of rock only, 

 the above inference cannot hold good, and the conclu- 

 sions derived from the morphological study of the 

 implements — namely, that they are devoid of all inten- 

 tional shape — is fully confirmed. 



The vocabulary of Aboriginal words is, unfortu- 

 nately, very limited. Calder (1), whose compilation is 



(i) Language and Dialects spoken by the Aborigines of Tas- 

 mania. Parliamentary Papers, 1901. No. 69. 



