134 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 
piece against the anvil with thumb and finger of his left hand, he 
commenced a series of blows, every one of which chipped off frag- 
ments of the brittle substance.” The patient artificer worked up- 
wards 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. 
In the various narratives, as will be seen, right-handedness is not 
only assumed as the normal, but as the invariable characteristic of 
the worker in obsidian or flint. But an ingenious investigator, 
Mr. F. H. Cushing, 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 implements of the Stone Age perpetu- 
ate for us a record of the use of one or the other hand in their 
manufacture. With the instinctive zeal of youthful enthusiasm, 
Mr. Cushing, while still a boy, on his father’s farm in Western New 
York, carried out a 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. In his various 
attempts he aimed at placing hinself in the same conditions as the 
primitive manufacturer of Europe’s Stone Age, or of the ancient 
Mound Builders of this Continent, devoid of metallic tools, and 
with the flint, obsidian, jasper, or hornstone, as the most available 
material out of which to fashion nearly all needful implements. He 
set to work accordingly with no other appliances than such sticks, 
and variously shaped stones, as could be found on the banks of the 
streams where he sought his materials. The results realize to us, in 
a highly interesting way, the earliest stages in the training of the 
self-taught workman of the Paleolithic Age. After making various 
implements akin to the most rudely fashioned examples from the 
river-drift or the old flint pits, by means of chipping one flint or 
stone with another, he satisfied himself that no amount of chipping, 
however carefully practised, would produce surfaces like the best of 
those which he was trying to imitate. He accordingly assumed that 
there must be some other process unknown to him. By chance he 
tried pressure with the point of a stick, instead of chipping with a 
stone, and the mystery was solved. He had hit on the method in 
use by Aztecs, Eskimos, atid Red Indians; and found that he could 
o 
