368 



COLUMBIAN HISTORICAL EXPOSITION AT MADRID. 



aud fishing with nets were unknown arts; when the early American, 

 like the modern Australian or Andamanese, was yet ignorant of the 

 use of the bow? 



We must think that even the art of chipping stone had its beginning; 

 that at some time in the past, man, once ignorant of it, learned it; that 

 somewhere upon the earth lie fractured rocks to tell us, did we know 

 their secret, of that moment when an ancestor chipped one for the first 

 time. To pick up two bowlders and knock with one a piece from the 

 other is to force the thought upon ourselves, as we feel the sharp edge 

 of the fragment, that this makeshift knife, this tool of many uses, 

 fashioned anywhere at a blow, was man s first implement of stone. 1 



THE CHIP. 



The chip, as a knife or other implement, is probably too simple to 

 have been preceded by any other stone form, too handy ever to have 

 been laid aside by humanity in its age of stone. 



Fig. 1. 



JASPER NUCLEI AND FLAKES. 



Made by ancient stone workers, gathered about the edges of the old diggings at the aboriginal jasper quarry and blade workshop at 



Flint Ridge, Licking County, Ohio. 



Anyone would recognize as of human make the thin, narrow, flakes of 

 jasper collected by Mr. Gerard Fowke from Flint Eidge, Ohio, and 

 the attractive nuclei from which they have been worked, as exhibited 

 by the Smithsonian Institution (fig. 1), and in the cases of the Uni 

 versity of Pennsylvania, and be inclined to assign for them an ancient 

 use. No doubt many of them were bound in handles with thongs, like 

 the mounted bitts of hoop iron from Alaska, or set in with glue like that 

 made of boiled fish and bones and wild cherry gum mentioned by Peter 

 Kalm. So with the similar chips of obsidian and flint in the Mcara- 

 guan exhibit, while it would be easier still to label as human relics the 



See for an argument that man was a stone batterer and polisher (Neolithic) before 

 he became a stone chipper, and that the so-called Palaeolithic status of culture never 

 existed, Mr. J. D. McGuire s paper in the American Anthropologist lor July, 1893. 



