34 STONE IMPLEMENTS, ETC., IX THE DORSET MUSEUM. 



peg or block, loosely fitting the central opening. The game may 

 have been played by turning the disc round on that axis, during 

 which rotation the players would drop balls into the holes, and 

 score according to the depth of the hole catching each ball. I give 

 this idea with much doubt, and shall be grateful for opinions. 



And now I must, at length, wind up with a word, and a short 

 word, on the Palaeolithic implements in the Dorset Museum, and 

 on the limitation of the witness to be derived from them. The 

 implements in question are not numerous. There is one flint, from 

 the gravel at Blandford, on the artificial working of which much 

 doubt has been thrown. Yet it is so like the French " river-drift " 

 men's worked flints from St. Acheul and other places that I feel 

 bound to mention it. There is, again, a roughly chipped celt from 

 Norden, presented by Mr. Cunnington. It is pronounced to be 

 Palaeolithic. It is not, however, of any of the usual Palaeolithic 

 shapes, to my own eye. Thirdly, there is a worked flint found by 

 Mr. Cunnington in red clay at the west of Maiden Castle. Lastly, 

 I have to draw your attention to one specimen in the general 

 collection and to a group of twenty-three in the Cunnington 

 Collection of wonderfully well-worked implements JtdrJies the 

 French call them all from Broom ballast pit, Hawk church. Here 

 there must have been a manufactory, for that pit has produced 

 certainly several scores, perhaps hundreds, of specimens. And they 

 are, most of them, as sharp and unworn as on the day when they 

 were made. In shape, and in what Evans considers quite an 

 important characteristic namely, in orange brown colour, they are 

 palpably Palaeolithic. One of them is remarkably large, nine inches 

 long. In clever shaping, and accurate, although bold flaking, it 

 certainly seems to me that the Hawkchurch flint " knapper " 

 sitting among the gravel there day after day, back in the far 

 dimness of Time, was a cleverer fellow " of his hands " than his 

 Neolithic, far more recent successors. 



And now as a close allow me to ask you to note the often 

 ignored, although geologically obvious, difference between what we 

 are told by the white celts of the Durotrigian Neolithic people and 



