PRIMHVAL DEXTERITY. 135 
fashion the fractured flint or obsidian into nearly any shape that 
he desired. 
J have recently learned from Mr. Cushing, that the instrument 
employed by him in some of those experiments was the same which 
Dr. John Evans informs me he accidentally hit upon in his earliest 
successful efforts at flint arrow-making, viz., a tooth-brush handle. 
In thus employing a bone or horn flaker, the sharp edge of the flake 
euts slightly into the none ; and when the latter is twisted suddenly 
upward, a small scale flies off at the point of pressure in a direction 
which can be foreseen and controlled. With this discovery the 
essential process of arrow-making had been mastered. Spear and 
arrow-heads could be flaked with the most delicate precision, with 
no such liability to fracture as leads to constant failure in any 
attempt to chip even the larger and ruder spear or axe-heads into 
shape. The hammer-stone only suffices for breaking off a flake from 
the rough flint nodule, and trimming it roughly into the required 
form, preparatory to the delicate manipulation of edging, pointing, 
and notching the arrow-head. The thinning of the flint-blade is 
effected by detaching long thin scales or flakes from the surface by 
using the flaker like a chisel and striking it a succession of blows 
with a hammer-stone. The marks of this surface-flaking are abund- 
antly manifest on the highly-finished Danish knives, daggers, and 
large spear-heads, as well as upon most other flint implements of 
Europe’s Neolithic Age. The large spear and tongue-shaped imple- 
ments of the drift are, on the contrary, rudely chipped, evidently by 
the blows of a hammer-stone ; although some of the drift implements 
seem to indicate that the use of the flint or bone flaker was not 
unknown to the men of the Paleolithic Age. But the chipping- 
stone or hammer was in constant use at the later period ; and small 
hammer-stones with indentations on the sides for the finger and 
thumb, and with their rounded edges marked with the evidence of 
long use in chipping the flint nodules into the desired forms, abound 
both in Europe and America, wherever the arrow-maker has carried 
on his primitive art. The implements in use varied with the avail- 
able material. A T-shaped wooden flaker sufficed for the Aztecs in 
shaping the easily worked obsidian. The jasper, chalcedony, and 
quartz, in like manner, yield readily to the pressure of a slender 
flaker of horn ; whereas Mr. Cushing notes that the “tough horn- 
stone of Western Arctic America could not be flaked by pressure in 
