41 8 NATURE AND MAN. 



brought into public notice, there were many persons who said, 

 " The shaping of these flints is merely accidental ; the flint fell 

 ''into a river in which there were many stones knocking about, 

 " and the fractures have been produced by the flint having got, 

 "so to speak, under a number of hammers ; so that, a bit having 

 " been broken away here and a bit there, it has come to be shaped 

 "as it is now found." I will "not say that this is an absolutely 

 impossible supposition with respect to any single example ; but 

 when we find numbers of these flints, all showing the same form, 

 in one gravel bed, — when we meet with forms exactly similar in 

 other gravel beds — and when we learn that exactly similar flints 

 are used at the present time by peoples (some of the hill tribes 

 of India, for instance) among whom iron implements have not 

 yet found their way, the implements being held in a cleft stick, 

 and bound round by a leather thong, — then, I think, we have an 

 accumulation of evidence which makes it inconceivable that these 

 gravel flints, of which I have spoken, owed their shape to any- 

 thing else than human handiwork. But besides these large and 

 powerful implements, there are also a number of other kinds. 

 Some of these, though smaller, are of the same general shape, 

 each showing a similar series of regularly disposed fractures. 

 But there are also found, in the same beds and in the same 

 numbers, smaller "flakes" of flint, whose shapes might more 

 easily be supposed to have been accidentally acquired, for many 

 of them exhibit only two fractured surfaces, indicative of two 

 knocks ; so that it would be by no means inconceivable that any 

 single flake had been casually struck off by a second blow from 

 a flint which had already sustained a fracture nearly in the same 

 direction. But when we look at a number of these found together, 

 and when we know that similar flakes are used as cutting instru- 

 ments at the present time by some of the survivors of the old 

 "flint folk" (being often retained for sacrificial purposes, long 

 after the use of metallic cutting instruments has become general), 

 then we come to feel sure that even these small flakes must have 

 been struck off with a purpose. 



Such is the cumulative argument that I would draw from a 

 consideration of this case. Even if we admit it as conceivable 

 that any single flint implement, or a small number of implements, 



