PRIMHVAL DEXTERITY. 131 
French caves; an interesting example occurred among the objects 
embedded in the red cave-earth of Kents’s Hole, Devonshire ; and 
others, of different periods, usually quartzite pebbles, or nodules of 
flint, have been found in many localities. Some of them were 
probably used in breaking the larger bones to extract the marrow ; 
but the battered edges of others show their contact with harder 
material. Similar hammer-stones occur in the Danish peat-mosses, 
in the Swiss lake dwellings, and on our own continent, among other 
remains of the arts of the aborigines. 
The mode of fashioning the large, tongue-shaped implements and 
rude stone hatchets, which are among the most characteristic drift 
implements, it can scarcely be doubted, was by blows of a stone or 
flint hammer; as was obviously the case with some large flint or 
horn-stone implements recovered from the pits of the Flint Ridge, a 
silicious deposit of the carboniferous age, which extends through the 
State of Ohio, from Newark to New Lexington.* At various points 
along the ridge, funnel-shaped pits occur, varying from four or five 
to fifteen feet deep; and similar traces of ancient mining may be 
seen in other localities, as at Leavenworth, about three hundred 
miles below Cincinnati, where the grey flint, or chert, abounds, of 
which large implements are chiefly made. The sloping sides of the 
pits are in many cases covered with the fractured flints, some of 
them partially shaped as if for manufacture. The work in the quarry 
was, no doubt, the mere rough fashioning of the flint by the tool- 
makers, with a view to facility of transport, in many cases, to dis- 
tant localities. But the finer manipulation, by means of which the 
carefully-finished arrow-heads, knives, lances, hoes, drills, scrapers, 
etc., were manufactured, was reserved for leisurely and patient skill. 
It is now known that the more delicate operations in the finishing 
of the flint implements were done by means of pressure with a horn 
or bone arrow-flaker; and not by blows with a chisel or hammer. 
Specimens of the arrow-flakers in use by the American Indian and 
the Eskimo workers in flint are familiar to us. Different forms of 
those instruments are engraved among the illustrations to “The 
Ancient Stone Iniplements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great 
Britain ;’t and Dr. Evans describes the mode of using them as 
witnessed by Sir Edward Belcher among the Eskimo of Cape 
* Prehistoric Man, 3rd Ed., i. 70, Figs. 5, 6 and 7. 
+ Evans’ Stone Implements, Figs. 8, 9, 10. 
