134 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



'piece against the anvil with thumb and finger of his left hand, he 

 -commenced a series of blows, every one of which chipped off frag- 

 ments of the brittle substance." The patient artificer worked up- 

 wards of an hour before he succeeded in producing a perfect arrow 

 head. His ingenious skill excited the admiration of the spectator, 

 who adds the statement that, among the Indians of California, 

 arrow-making is a distinct profession, in which few attain excellence. 

 In the various narratives, as will be seen, right-handedness is not 

 ■only assumed as the normal, but as the invariable characteristic of 

 the worker in obsidian or flint. But an ingenious investigator, 

 Mr. F, H. Gushing, of the Smithsonian Institution, while engaged 

 in a series of tentative experiments to determine the process of 

 working in flint and obsidian, had his attention accidentally called 

 to the fact that the primitive implements of the Stone Age perpetu- 

 ate for us a record of the use of one or the other hand in their 

 manufacture. With the instinctive zeal of youthful enthusiasm, 

 JMr. Gushing, while still a boy, on his father's farm in Western New 

 York, carried out a series of flint workings with a view to ascertain 

 for himself the process by which the ancient arrow-makers fashioned 

 the flint implements that then excited his interest. In his various 

 -attempts he aimed at placing hinself in the same conditions as the 

 primitive manufacturer of Europe's Stone Age, or of the ancient 

 Mound Builders of this Gontinent, devoid of metallic tools, and 

 with the flint, obsidian, jasper, or homstone, as the most available 

 material out of which to fashion nearly all needful implements. He 

 set to work accordingly with no other appliances than such sticks, 

 and variously shaped stones, as could be found on the banks of the 

 streams where he sought his materials. The results realize to us, in 

 a highly intei*esting way, the earliest stages in the training of the 

 self-taught workman of the Palseolithic Age. After making various 

 implements akin to the most rudely fashioned examples from the 

 river-drift or the old flint pits, by means of chipping one flint or 

 stone with another, he satisfied himself that no amount of chipping, 

 however carefully practised, would produce surfaces like the best of 

 those which he was trying to imitate. He accordingly assumed that 

 there must be some other process unknown to him. By chance he 

 tried pressure with the point of a stick, instead of chipping with a 

 ;stone, and the mystery was solved. He had hit on the method in 

 aise by Aztecs, Eskimos, and Red Indians ; and found that he could 



