126 DAOTEL WILSON ON 



piilated with the other. Siguor Craveri, ^Yhose loug résidence in Mexico gave him very 

 favourable opiiortuuities for observing the process of the native workers in obsidian, 

 remarks that, when the Indians " wish to make an arrow or other instrument of a splinter 

 of obsidian, they take the piece in the left hand, and hold grasped in the other a small goat's 

 horn. They set this piece of obsidian upon the horn, and dexterously pressing it against 

 the point of it, while they give the horn a gentle movement from right to left, and up and 

 down, they disengage from it frequent chips ; and in this way obtain the desired form. " ' 

 Again, in an account communicated to Sir Charles Lyell by Mr. Cabot, of the mode of pro- 

 cedure of the Shasta Indian arrow-makers, after describing the detachment of a piece from 

 the obsidian pebble with the help of an agate chisel, he thus proceeds : " Holding the 

 piece against the anvil with thumb and finger of his left hand, he commenced a series of 

 blows, every one of which chipped olF fragments of the brittle substance." The patient 

 artificer worked upwards of an hour before he succeeded in producing a perfect arrow-head. 

 His ingenious skill excited the admiration of the spectator, who adds the statement 

 that, among the Indians of California, arrow-making is a distinct profession, in which few 

 attain excellence. 



The point noticeable here in reference to the accounts given by the Avarions observers, 

 is the uniform assumption of right-handedness. Mr. Redding, Siguor Craveri, and Mr. 

 Cabot, not only agree in describing the block of obsidian as held in the left hand, while 

 the tools are employed in the right hand to fashion it into shape ; but the whole language, 

 especially in the description given by Signor Craveri, assumes right-handedness as, not 

 only the normal, but the invariable characteristic of the worker in stone. In reality, 

 however, an ingenious investigator, Mr. F. H. Cu.sliiug of the Smithsonian Institution, 

 while engaged in a series of tentative experiments to determine the process of working in 

 flint and obsidian, had his attention accidentally called to the fact that the primitive im- 

 plements of the Stone Age perpetuate for us a record of the use of one or the other hand in 

 their manufacture. "With the instinctive zeal of youthful enthusiasm, Mr. Cushiug, while 

 still a boy, on his father's farm in "Western New York, carried out a systematic series of 

 flint workings with a view to ascertain for himself the process by which the ancient 

 arrow-makers fashioned the'flint implements that then excited his interest. After repeated 

 failures in his attempts to chip the flint into the desired shape by striking oft" fragments 

 with a stone hammer, he accidentally discovered that small flakes could be detached from 

 the flint core with great certainty and precision by pressure with a pointed rod of bone or 

 horn ; and, as I have recently learned from him, the instrument employed by him in 

 those experiments was the same as that which Dr. John Evans informs me he accidentally 

 hit upon in his earliest successful eflbrts at flint-arrow making, viz., a tooth-brush 

 handle. In thus employing a bone or horn flaker, the sharp edge of the flake cuts 

 slightly into the bone ; and when the latter is twisted suddenly upward, a small scale 

 flies off at the point of pressure in a direction which can be foreseen and controlled. 

 "With this discovery the essential process of arrow-making had been mastered. Spear 

 and. arrow-heads could be flaked with the most delicate precision, with no such liability 

 to fracture as leads to constant failure in any attempt to chip even the larger and ruder 

 spear or axe-heads into shape. The hammer-stone only suffices for the earlier pro- 



' Translated from Gastal Ji. See Evans' Stone Implements, p. 36. 



