534 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
attempts seem to have ended in failure. This subject was discussed 
in my vice-presidential address“ before section H of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science at the New York meeting 
in 1906. The recent discoveries of eoliths on the plateau of Hautes- 
Fagnes and at Boncelles, near Liege, by de Munck and Rutot, have 
an important bearing on this whole subject. At Boncelles eoliths 
are said to be found in undisturbed middle Oligocene deposits, which 
is the lowest horizon yet recorded for them. 
The fact that the Tasmanians when they became extinct in 1876 
were still in a culture stage corresponding to the eolithic has done 
much to strengthen the thesis of that school. In this connection 
should be mentioned the discovery by Franz de Zeltner in Haute 
Senegal of a quite recent industry with eolithic facies. Rutot also 
finds in Belgium that a neolithic epoch, to which he has given the 
name “ Flénusian,” is characterized by a similar industry. 
But eoliths were introduced here only to be retired from the stage 
in order that more space might be given to the doings of the paleo- 
lithic school. I can not dismiss them, however, without first referring 
to Verworn’s? rule of the one-sided marginal working of a flake 
or chip. No single character is a sufficient basis for declaring that a 
given stone object is or is not an artifact. Each specimen should be 
subjected to a systematic diagnosis, as is a case of fever, for example, 
by a physician, says Verworn. In observing a number of paleo- 
lithic or neolithic scrapers that are made from flakes which are 
retouched on one side only, one finds that the direction from which 
the retouching took place is almost always oriented in the same 
manner with respect to the sides of the flake. If one calls the under 
or bulb side of the flake the front and the outer side the back, one 
sees that the blows or the pressure which produced the marginal 
working was executed almost always from the front toward the back, 
that the tiny scars left by the chipping begin at the margin and 
extend over the back. The chipping is therefore visible only from the 
back; only in rare cases does one find the opposite orientation of the 
chipping. 
What is the meaning of this? There is too much method in it to 
be the result of chance. There is even more than mere method. By 
following the rule as expressed in figure 1 a—c, we arrive at a tool 
that is utilizable. The edge produced by the chipping is straight, as 
seen in figure 1¢. On the other hand, if the opposite method of chip- 
ping is followed we arrive at a meandering irregular edge-line that is 
good for nothing from a practical standpoint (fig. 2 ¢). In rare 
instances the back of the flake may be more regular than the front. 
“Some phases of prehistoric archeology. Proc. Am. Ass. Ady. Sci., vol. 56, 
1907. 
6’Max Verworn. Ein Objectives Kriterium fiir die Beurteilung der Manufakt- 
natur geschlagener Feuersteine. Zeit. fiir Ethnol., vol. 40, 548, 1908. 
