38 INTRODUCTION 



suddenly appear like an inventive mutation, but very slowly 

 evolve as their usefulness is demonstrated by practice. 



The shaft is very rarely perforated at the base for the 

 attachment of a line ^ ; it is cylindrical (later fiat) in form 

 adapted to the capture of large fish in streams. The harpoons 

 may possibly have been projected by means of the so-called 

 proptdseurs or dart throwers, which resemble the Eskimo and 

 AustraUan implements of to-day. 



Amidst the clash of opinion as to the exact use and method 

 of use of these weapons, my conclusion, admitttedly incapable 

 of absolute proof, holds that the Palaeolithic fisher owes to the 

 hunter the inception of the chief weapon of his equipment, the 

 Spear-Harpoon. 



Paul Broca's dictum 2 that INIan hunted before he fished 

 seems, perhaps, despite Dall's excavation of Eskimo debris, ^ 

 to be borne out by Troglodyte records both positive and 

 negative. The Gorge or bait-holder was employed by the 

 hunter (according to some) even earher than by the fisher. 

 Gorges have been from time immemorial and still are in vogue 

 in the Untersee for the capture of marine birds, as is the case 

 to-day with the Eskimos of Norton Sound. 



From the chronicles of Rau, H. Philips, and others can be 

 built a Table of Generations, or the story of how the Hunting 

 Spear begat the Fishing Spear, which begat the Harpoon 

 unilaterally barbed, which in turn begat the Harpoon bi- 

 laterally barbed, until about the tenth or twentieth generation 

 — one is appalled at the amount of Succession Duty which such 



* H. J. Osborne {op. cit., p. 385 ff.) states that, with the exception of one 

 half-finisiied hole in a Harpoon from La Madelaine, the side hole for the 

 attachment of the thong to the Harpoon does not appear in the French Magda- 

 lenian Harpoon, although in those from Cantabria it is nearly always present. 

 The Azilian weapon usually bears a hole. 



* The Troglodytes of the Vezire Valley, Smithsonian Report, 1872, p. 95. 



^ In Contributions to North American Ethnology, 1877, i. p. 43, Dall states 

 that the debris of the heaps show tolerably uniform division into three stages, 

 characterised by the food which formed the staple of subsistence and by the 

 weapons for obtaining as well as the utensils for preparing the food. The 

 stages are: ist. The Littoral period, represented by the Echinus layer; 

 2nd, The Fishing period, represented by the Fish-bone layer ; 3rd, The 

 Hunting period, represented by the Mammalian layer. This antecedence 

 of fishing before hunting, if Dall be correct, was, I imagine, caused probably 

 by local or climatic conditions in the Arctic Circle ; it is not the general rule 

 elsewhere. 



