200 REV. BR. A. BULLEN, B.A., ON EOLITHIC IMPLEMENTS. 
savage had two ideas in the selection and use of these 
conveniently shaped stones, viz., hammering and scraping 
and this is just what one would have expected. Some 
years since the late Professor Leidy gave me a stone scraper 
which was used by a tribe of North American Indians for 
dressing buffalo skins: it was an ordinary smooth quartzite 
pebble, split in half with the thin sharp edge carefully 
removed, exactly like the plateau Eocene pebbles described 
in your paper.” 
Our authority, Dr. Prestwich,* divides the eoliths into the 
eighteen types according to their shapes. 
The edges in Prestwich’s Group I. are blunt; and in this 
Mr. Montgomerie Bell, although accepting them as of human 
workmanship, finds a difficulty. 
But is there really a difficulty ?. The tools called’ “sleekers” 
used in the early part of the century by tanners for remov- 
ing fat from skins before tanning, were of wood, flat, blunt, 
and of square form. At present a blunt steel blade is used 
with a wooden back, as I have satisfied myself at Barrow’s 
Tannery, Redhill, and at the Shalford Tannery, both in 
Surrey. Carpenters also used a blunt steel scraper about 
40 years ago. Moreover, some undoubted neoliths are 
trimmed to a blunt edge: I have one such from Pakefield 
and others from Newnham near Cambridge, and Clapham 
Hill near Whitstable. 
Among the implements from the plateau are several 
squarish eoliths with flaked and chipped edges (Plate IV, 
Figs. 1, 2)t analogues of the above mentioned sleekers. 
Probably the round scrapers also were used in dressing 
skins. 
Another set of tools characteristic of the plateau drift 
is the double-shoulder scraper (Plate IV, Fig. 5). Some 
of these have the chips struck off at the same general angle 
and on the same side of each shoulder. These are probably 
scrapers. 
There are others, however, in which the chips were struck 
off at the same general angle, but the resultant surfaces are 
on opposite sides of the two curves respectively. They 
thus form a boring tool; for, if the point were worked into 
* Controverted Questions, pp. 69, 70, and 71. The type collection is 
now in the British Museum (Natural History), Cromwell Road. 
+ Prestwich, Controverted Questions, Plate I, Fig. 1, p. 80. 
{ Prestwich, Jbid., Plate VII, Figs. 20-25 ; Plate XII, Fig. 40. 
