374 COLUMBIAN HISTORICAL EXPOSITION AT MADRID. 



Moreover, not all the smaller blades in the above series are chipped. 

 Nos. 16 and 17, representing the specimens from Maine, &quot;KewNTork, and 

 Alaska, are of polished slate (National Museum, Nos. 6375, 65^, 30758, 

 and 62097), and these are almost duplicated by the Alaskan and Cuban 

 examples of polished slate in the Spanish exhibit, No. 49. 



It would have been of much help to the student of archaeology had 

 early American travelers noticed more exactly the methods employed 

 by Indians in finding or quarrying their material for chipped imple 

 ments, transporting it, and fashioning it into weapons and tools. 



The National Museum exhibits an interesting case (see Plate I) con 

 taining the apparatus for arrow making among the Hupa Indians in 

 northern California, described by Dr. O. T. Mason in the Smithsonian 

 Report, 1886, part 1. 



Capt. John Smith (sixth voyage, 1606) saw a Virginia Indian quickly 

 making his arrowhead &quot;with a little bone which he everweareth at his 

 bracept of a splint of a stone or glasse in the form of a heart, and these 

 they glue to the end of their arrows.&quot; 



Caleb Lyou (see extract from letter in Bulletin of American Ethno 

 logical Society, vol. 1, p. 39) saw, about 1860, a Shasta Indian in Cali 

 fornia place an obsidian pebble upon a stone anvil of talcose slate held 

 upon the knee, and with one blow of an agate chisel separate it into 

 two parts ; from one of these a slab one-fourth of an inch thick was 

 split off, which slab, being held against the anvil with the left thumb 

 and finger, was chipped into an inch-long arrowhead by a series of con 

 tinual blows in little less than an hour. 



While Smith s Indian worked entirely by pressure, this arrowhead 

 seems to have been produced entirely by direct percussion. 



George Catlin (see Last Rambles among the Indians, chapter 5, pp. 

 187-190) saw, about 1860-1868, the Apaches making arrowheads by 

 what might be called indirect percussion. 



An erratic bowlder of flint, &quot;sometimes brought from an immense 

 distance,&quot; was first &quot;broken into a hundred pieces&quot; by the &quot;indiscrim 

 inate&quot; blows of a hafted hornstone pebble. From these splinters such 

 flakes were selected as from their angle of fracture and thickness 

 answered as the bases of arrowheads. 



On one laid on the left palm of tho master workman and held down 

 by his left fingers, a punch 6 or 7 inches long and 1 inch in diameter, 

 made of the incisor of a sperm whale, and with its point presenting 

 one acute and two obtuse angles, was rested against the part to be 

 broken. This punch was then continually struck by a cooperator, to 

 the time of a song, with a heavy wooden mallet, flaking off the flint 

 under each projecting point struck at every blow until the arrowhead 

 was finished. 



Nice judgment was used in selecting a flake with two opposite 

 parallel or nearly parallel planes, and of the thickness required for the 



