64 SIK DANIEL WILSON 



any matter oi" surprise to be told of the discovery of a palœolithic workshop-floor of 

 the Drift period, near Ealing. It lay about a hundred feet above the present bed of the 

 Thames ; and here, six feet below the surface, on an ancient sloping bank of the river, an 

 area of about forty feet square disclosed nearly six hundred uuabraded worked flints, 

 including neatly finished spear heads from five to six inches long. Along side of these 

 lay roughly wrought axes, chipped on one or both sides to a cutting edge, and some of 

 them unfinished. There were also flint flakes, some with serrated edges, and well- 

 finished knives, borers, drills, chisels, etc. Waste flakes and chippings, as well as cores, 

 or partially worked blocks of flint, were also observed in sufficient numbers to leave no 

 doubt that here, in the place of their manufacture, lay buried beneath the accumulations 

 of unnumbered centuries industrial products of the skilled artizans of the British Islands 

 contemporary with the long-extinct Quaternary fauna.' 



The types of flint implements, found at Hoxnein 1*797, correspond to other palœoliths 

 recovered from rolled gravel and clay of the glacial drift in the valleys of the Thames, the 

 Somme and the Seine. In their massive and artless rudeness they seem to realize for us 

 some fit ideal of the primitive fabricator in his first efforts at tool-making. But the 

 Ealing find accords with the more extended discoveries of this class. In reality, the 

 manufactures of palœolithic man, as a whole, are less artless than many examples of 

 modern Indian flint-work. Not a few of the stone axes have had their shape determined 

 by that of the water-worn stones out of which they were fashioned, and so required 

 much less skill than was necessarily expended in chipping the flint nodule into the rudest 

 of pointed implements. Any close-grained rock, admitting of grinding and polish, was 

 available for fashioning the larger weapons and domestic implements, alike among the men 

 of the Neolithic age and the native races of the American continent in modern centuries. 

 For many of the simpler reciuirements of the tool-user, any apt stone chip or water-worn 

 pebble sufficed ; and scarcely anything can be conceived of more rude or artless than 

 some of the stone weapons and implements in use among savage tribes at the presen 

 day. Prof Joseph Leidy describes a scraper employed by the Shoshone Indians in 

 dressing buffalo skins, consisting of a thin segment of quartzite, so devoid of manipulative 

 skill that, he says, had he noticed it among the strata of indurated clays and sandstone, 

 instead of seeing it in actual use, he would have regarded it as an accidental spawl." 

 Dr. Charles C. Abbott, in his " Primitive Industry of the Native Races," furnishes 

 illustrations of pointed flakes, or arrow tips, triangular arrow heads, spear heads, and 

 other stone implements, only a little less rude and shapeless.' Of a similar character 

 is the blade of a war-club in use among the Indians of the Eio Frio, in Texas.' Nothing 

 so rude has been ascribed to artificial origin among the disclosures of the drift, though 

 corresponding implements may have escaped notice ; for were it not that the chipped 

 piece of trachyte of the Texas war-club is inserted in a wooden haft of unmistakable 

 human workmanship, the blade would scarcely suggest the idea of artificial origin. Mere 

 rudeness, therefore, is no certain evidence of the first ai'tless efforts of man to furnish him- 

 self with tools. 



Until we an-ive at the period of neolithic art, with its perforated hammers, grooved 



' Athenreuni, Dec. IS, 188(1. " U. S Geological Survey, 1S72, p. 052. 



•' Primitive Industry, figs. 241, 254, 292, 295, &c. * Evans' Stone Implements, fig. 94. 



