ON THE STONE AGE. 87 



effaced all traces of the old arrow-makers of Bauchman's Beach. Specimens of their 

 handiwork may still be gathered along the shore. To this locality it is obvious that the 

 inland tribes resorted from remote Indian villages for some of their most indispensable 

 supplies. Implements of the same materials also occur at sites on the northern coast ; 

 but the larger number found there are made of quartzite, felsite, or of hard, slaty 

 rocks, such as occur in the metamorphic rocks of the mountain ranges in the interior of 

 the Province. 



From what has thus beeu set forth, some general inferences of a comprehensive char- 

 acter are suggested. It is scarcely open to doubt that at a very early stage in the develop- 

 ment of primitive mechanical art, the exceptional aptitude of skilled workmen was recog- 

 nized and brought into use for the general benefit. Cooperation and some division of 

 labour in the industrial arts, necessary to meet the universal demand for tools and 

 weapons, appear also to have been recognized from a very remote period in the social life 

 of the race. There were the quarriers for the flint, the obsidian, the shale, the pipe- 

 stones, the favourite minerals, and the close-grained igneous rocks adapted for the variety 

 of implements in general use. There were also the traders, by whom the raw material 

 was transported to regions where it could only be procured by barter ; as appears to be 

 demonstrated by the repeated discovery, not only of flint and stone implements, alike in 

 stray examples, and in well-furnished caches ; but also of work places, remote from any 

 flint-producing formation, strewn with the chips, flakes, and imperfect or unfinished 

 implements of the tool-makers. It thus becomes obvious that the men of the earliest 

 Stone age transported suitable material for their simple arts from many remote localities ; 

 and purchased the services of the skilled workman, with the produce of the chase, or 

 whatever other equivalent they could offer in exchange. The further archœological 

 search is extended, the evidence of social of social cooperation and systematized industry 

 among the men of the Palœolithic era, as well as among those of later periods prior to 

 the dawn of métallurgie skill, becomes more apparent. Nor is it less interesting to note 

 these was no more equality among the men of those primitive ages, than in the later 

 civilized stage. Diversities in capacity and consequent moral force asserted themselves 

 in the skilled handicraftsmen of the Palaeolithic dawn, much as they do in the mosl 

 artificial states of modern society. As a natural concomitant to this, and an invaluable 

 element of social cooperation, the prized flint flakes appear to have furnished a primitive 

 medium of exchange, more generally available as a currency of recognized value than 

 auy other siibstitute for coined money. The principles on which the wealth of nations 

 and the whole social fabric of human society depend, were thus already in operation 

 ages before the merchants of Tyre, or the traders of Massala, had learned of the 

 mineral resources of the Cassiterides ; or that vaguer and still more remote era before 

 the ancient Atlantis had vanished from the ken of the civilized dwellers around the 

 Mediterranean Sea. 



