PRIMEVAL DEXTERITY. 135 



fashion the fractured flint or obsidian into nearly any shape that 

 he desired. 



T have recently learned from Mr. Gushing, that. the instrument 

 employed by him in some of those experiments was the same which 

 Dr. John Evans informs me he accidentally hit upon in his earliest 

 successful efforts at flint arrowrmaking, viz., a tooth-brush handle. 

 In thus employing a bone or horn flaker, the sharp edge of the flake 

 cuts slightly into the bone ; and when the latter is twisted suddenly 

 upward, a small scale flies off at the point of pressure in a direction 

 which can be foreseen and controlled. With this discovery the 

 essential process of arrow-making had been mastered. Spear and 

 arrow-heads could be flaked with the most delicate precision, with 

 no such liability to fracture as leads to constant failure in any 

 attempt to chip even the larger and ruder spear or axe-heads into 

 shape. The hammer-stone only suffices for breaking off a flake from 

 the rough flint nodule, and trimming it roughly into the required 

 form, preparatory to the delicate manipulation of edging, pointing, 

 and notching the arrow-head. The thinning of the flint-blade is 

 effected by detaching long thin scales or flakes from the surface by 

 using the flaker like a chisel and striking it a succession of blows 

 with a hammer-stone. The marks of this surface-flaking are abund- 

 antly manifest on the highly- finished Danish knives, daggers, and 

 large spear-heads, as well as upon most other flint implements of 

 Europe's Neolithic Age. The large spear and tongue-shaped imple- 

 ments of the drift are, on the contrary, rudely chipped, evidently by 

 the blows of a hammer-stone ; although some of the drift implements 

 seem to indicate that the use of the flint or bone flaker was not 

 unknown to the men of the Palaeolithic Age. But the chipping- 

 stone or hammer was in constant use at the later period ; and small 

 hammer-stones with indentations on the sides for the finger and 

 thumb, and with their rounded edges marked with the evidence of 

 long use in chipping the flint nodules into the desired forms, abound 

 both in Europe and America, wherever the arrow-maker has carried 

 on his primitive art. The implements in use varied with the avail- . 

 able material. A T-shaped wooden flaker sufficed for the Aztecs in 

 shaping the easily worked obsidian. The jasper, chalcedony, and 

 quartz, in like manner, yield readily to the pressure of a slender 

 flaker of horn ; whereas Mr. Gushing notes that the " tough horn- 

 stone of Western Arctic America could not be flaked by pressure in 



