COLUMBIAN HISTORICAL EXPOSITION AT MADRID. 371 



knocked, and the disks themselves (see fig. 4), so excellently adapted for 

 cutting that we wonder how or why any other knife was used. 1 



The pebble nucleus would take another form when these knives 

 were knocked off in greater number, and from the sides rather than the 

 middle of the stone. (See fig. 3. ) 



ARROW AND SPEAR HEADS. 



A first glance at the arrow and spear heads (see fig. o) (including 

 scrapers, perforators, small leaf-shaped blades, etc.) continually dupli 

 cated from many parts of the New World would almost persuade us that 

 nothing original or distinctive had been found anywhere; that to mix 

 a score of the obsidian, chert, or flint points of the Shoshones, Sioux, 

 or Eskimo with similar weapons from Uruguay, Ecuador, or Central 

 America would be, save for the clue from the origin of their materials, 

 to hopelessly lose trace of their parentage. 



There is great variety in the kind of stone used, which I had no 

 means of having lithologically described (though the forms of jasper 

 and obsidian predominate), and in the size, the average being about 1J 

 inches in length. 



The large spears, as, for instance, the fourteen specimens of whitish 

 hornstone from Pike County, Arkansas (of shape 18, fig. 5), in the 

 National Museum exhibit, one of which was 12 inches long; a similar 

 one from Uruguay, and one of the same shape from New Jersey, meas 

 uring 6 inches, in the University of Pennsylvania exhibit; an obsidian 

 dagger (of form 75, fig. 5), 7J inches long, and a large saw-toothed spear 

 of hornstone, 3J inches long, in the Mexican exhibit, will be considered 

 separately under the head of large leaf-shaped blades. But after care 

 ful sorting it will be seen that even arrow and spear heads have their 

 characteristics. 



Fig. 5 speaks for itself, but we notice specially the dull, blunted form 

 (No. 5) with which most farmers boys in the United States are familiar, 

 having a sharp edge, a specimen of which (No. 11) from Alexander 

 County, North Carolina, is exemplified in the Austrian exhibit, and 

 which might have been mounted for use as a scraper, or as a dull 

 arrowhead for stunning animals. It is also found in Mexico (No. 91), 

 though not represented elsewhere. 



Whoever has seen the small French blades of Mousterian pattern, so 

 easily made where good flakes were at hand by chipping one side only, 

 must have wondered why the form is not more common among North 

 American specimens, but here it is at last, No. 14, from Maine (National 

 Museum, No. 98478), and common enough in Mexico (see No. 90 of 



] See paper &quot; River pebbles chipped by modern Indians as a clue to the study of 

 Trenton gravel implements,&quot; Proceedings of the American Association for the 

 Advancement of Science, Vol. XLI, 1892. 



