ON THE STONE AGE. 6S 



axes, net-sinkers, gouges, adzes, and numerous other ground and polished implements, 

 fashioned of granite, diorite, trap, and other igneous rocks, the forms of implements are few 

 and simple, dependent to a large extent on the natural cleavage of the flint. The com- 

 moner examples of neolithic art, recovered in thousands from ancient ScandinaA'ian, 

 Gaulish and British graves, from the lake-dvfellings of Switzerland, the Danish and 

 British shell mounds, the peat mosses of Denmark and Ireland, and from numerous other 

 depositories of prehistoric industrial art, are scarcely distinguishable from the flint knives, 

 scrapers, spears and arrow heads, or the chisels and axes, manufactured by the Indians 

 of this continent at the present day. The material available in certain lot'alities, such as 

 the claystone of the Haida and Babeen Indians, and the argillite of the old implement- 

 makers of New Jersey, the obsidian of Mexico, or the cjuartz, jasper, and greenstone of 

 many Canadian centres, give a spei ific character to the implements of the various regions ; 

 but, on the whole, the arts of the Stone period of the most diverse races and eras present 

 striking analogies, scarcely less suggestive of the operation of a tool-making instinct than 

 the work of the nest-bnilders, or the ingenious art of the beaver. But the massive and 

 extremely rude implements of the river drift and caves present essentially différent types, 

 controlled indeed, like the productions of later artificers by the natural cleavage and 

 other essential properties of the material in which the flint-worker wrought ; but with 

 some characteristic differences, suggestive of habits and conditions of life in which the 

 artificer of the Mammoth or Reindeer period differed from the tool-maker of Europe's 

 Neolithic age, or the Indian savage of modern centuries. 



The tool-bearing drift-gravel of France and England presents its relics of primitive 

 art intermingled with countless amorphous unwrought flints. Both have been subjected 

 to the violent action of floods, to which the present condition of such geological deposits 

 is due ; and many contents of the caves, though subjected to less violence, are the results 

 of similar causes. But, along with numerous implements of the rude drift type, the 

 sheltered recesses of the caves have preserved, not only the smaller and more delicate flint 

 implements, but carefully wrought tools and weapons of bone, horn and ivory. Some, at 

 least, of these undoubtedly belong to the Palaeolithic age ; and therefore tend to verify 

 conclusions, not only as to the mechanical ingenuity, but also as to the intellectual capa- 

 city of the earliest tool-makers. The large almond and tongue-shaped flint implements are 

 so massive as to have effectually resisted the violence to which they, along with other 

 contents of the rolled gravels in which they occur, were subjected ; whereas it is only in 

 the favoring shelter of the caves, or in rare primitive sepulchral deposits, that delicate 

 trimmed flakes and the more perishable implements of bone and ivory, or horn, have 

 escaped destruction. 



The palceolithic implements to which Boucher de Perthes directed attention so early 

 as 1840, were recovered from drift gravel beds, where amorphous flint nodules, both whole 

 and fractured, abound in countless numbers ; and this tended to suggest very reasonable 

 doubts as to the artificial origin of the rude implements lying in close proximity to them. 

 Nor was this incredulity lessened by the significance assigned by him to other contents 

 of the same drift gravel. For so far is Boucher de Perthes from overlooking the endless 

 variety of fractured pieces of flint recoverable from the drift beds, that his narrative is 

 supplemented by a series of plates of " L'Industrie primitive," the larger number of 

 which present chipped flints so obviously the mere products of accidental fracture or of 



Sec. II, 1889. 9. 



