134 EDGE TOOLS IN EARLY BRITAIN. 



whom it is given to the Dorset County Museum) says it 

 belonged to his father, J. C. Mansel-Pleydell, whow as very 

 intimate with Mr. Barnes and in constant communication 

 with him on archaeological subjects. The handwriting is 

 large and irregular, with rarely more than two or three 

 words in a line ; and, as will be readily noticed, the treatment 

 of the subject and the phraseology are characteristic of our 

 Dorset poet and philologist. 



TRANSCRIPT OF THE MANUSCRIPT. 



" There are words in English and Welsh that sound of 

 things of the Stone Age of our race. We have a steel edge 

 tool called a chisel, and we have by Portland a bank of pebbles 

 called the Chesil or chisel Beach, and chisel in Anglo-Saxon, 

 ceosel, now chesil or chisel, means a hard stone, such as a 

 flint or pebble, and we may belie Ve that the edge tool was 

 first called a ceosel when it was a chisel as a flint. 



" Then we have flint, and in Anglo-Saxon flean is an arrow, 

 and fleanet would mean a little arrow, or the arrow head ; 

 and fleanet would become shortened into fleant, or flint, 

 and the flint is often called by the Dorset folk " a vlint- 

 stwone " (a flint stone), since the word flint did not at first 

 mean a stone at all. So the Latin celtis is a chisel or knife, 

 and culter a knife, as for the ending -er strengthens the mean- 

 ing of a word. But in Welsh celt is a flint, so called from 

 caled, hard ; and the Fleam, the barbed lancet with which 

 cattle are bled (in its early Saxon or Friesic shape fleame), 

 meant a flying thing or an arrow head, to which in shape it 

 is not unlike. 



" Our word Hammer seems to have meant in its first use 

 and form a clump of hard stone. In the " Mittel hoch 

 deutsches Worterbuch " by Adolf Ziemann (the middle 

 high Dutch Word book) we have Hamer Harter Stein, Ham- 

 mer, a very hard stone. In old Friesic it is Homer. 



" In the time of Homer, which might have been a thousand 

 years ere the Nativity, for his lifetime was an unmarked 



