IMPLEMENTS AND WEAPONS OP THE STONE AGE. 133 



This seems to have been universally used among the 

 Northern Indians, and is highly valued as the first and 

 most delicious gift of nature in the opening of spring. 

 In the east the sugar maple and white maple are 

 tapped, and in the west the allied Negundo, or ash- 

 leaved maple. The juice was then boiled into syrup, 

 but Charlevoix states that among the Canadian Indians 

 at least, it was not crystallized into sugar until after 

 the arrival of the Europeans. 



In Europe these gouges are supposed to have been 

 used for hollowing canoes, but it is precisely in those 

 regions in America where bark canoes, and not those 

 of hollow logs, were used, that these hollow chisels 

 most abound. In some cases also, the hollow is cut 

 the whole length of the chisel, so that it forms a 

 spout which might be used to collect the sap as well 

 as to make the incision. These gouges were, how- 

 ever, probably used to hollow wooden troughs to 

 contain the juice, an operation which ' the modern 

 backwoodsman performs with an adze or a chisel. 

 The modern Scandinavians make sugar or syrup from 

 the birch, and as, according to Nilsson, the hollow 

 gouges of that country are found in nests or groups, 

 they may mark the sites of sugar camps. In that 

 country, however, it is probable that canoes were prin- 

 cipally made from trunks of trees, and the Polynesians 

 who used hollow stone chisels, must have employed 

 them in making such canoes. No hollow chisels ap- 

 pear as yet to have been found in connection with so- 

 called Palaeolithic remains, so that we do not know 



