_ 
50 THE AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
sult, and with the advent of scientific thought and its appli- 
cation to the industries, the mechanical progress in the last 
hundred years has been enormous. 
Let us suppose that a colony of present day eae de- 
pendent upon a vast multiplicity of mechanical devices for 
their, well-being, be deprived of all of these things which they 
look upon as necessary to life and be left upon some island 
well supplied with the flints, the ores of copper and tin and of 
iron. Supposing still that, in the course of the first six or 
seven generations, the metals remained undiscovered and the 
people had accustomed themselves to an existence upon such 
plants as could be found and game brought down with stones. 
The customs of their modern forefathers would soon be for- 
gotten and they would revert to the savagery necessitated by 
their environment. Then would doubtless follow a repetition 
of the series of discoveries and inventions which marked man’s 
advance to his present day status. The improvement of stone 
weapons, the discovery and use of bronze, the use of iron, and 
then of steel, would come even as it came before. It is true 
that such a colony would have the mental advantage of hun- 
dreds of generations of intensive thinking and inventive -peo- 
ple, and that mentally they would be of a type much higher 
than the primitive users of unworked stones. For this reason 
the progress would probably be more swift, but the order and 
method of invention would undoubtedly be the same. 
The classification of M. Adrien de Mortillet of simple tools 
in five groups is given in Table II. His first group contains 
tools for cutting, edge tools probably the first type to be de- 
veloped . The older stone flakes referred to the Chellean, 
found in river terraces of the ~Paris' basin, while 
known as a “hand-axe”’ by the English archaelogist, is 
better described by its French name—the Coup de Poing!— 
and was doubtless grasped in the hand and used as a knife. 
From the roughly broken stone fragment held in the hand 
up to the elaborately chipped blade-like daggers of the Ameri- 
can aborigines, made with a skill that no white man possesses, 
is simply a process of educational evolution—one process lead- 
ing to the next. 
Pointed knives of bone are found in the kitchen middens of 
1. Geikie, Jas. Antiquity of Man in Europe. 1914. P. 43. 
