GILPIN ON THE STONE AGE OF NOVA SCOTIA. ^%o 



that one can scarcely distinguish them from knives. The knife 

 lias one convex and one straight edge, and is immediately known. 

 A very fine one of hard red slate is in the museum of the St. John 

 Institute.* They doubtless were fitted with wooden handles. 

 Among the spear-heads are the beautiful ones found at Yarmouth, 

 which have a centre line of elevation, and a beauty of shape and 

 finish, and foreign air. With the exception of a large barbed 

 arrow of amythest found on Digby Neck, they are the most beauti- 

 ful found in the Province. 



These finish the chipped stone. The next are hammers, axes, 

 gouges, chisels, and what I term hand wedges, all ground and pol- 

 ished stones. The axes at once divide themselves into those with 

 grooves around their centre, and the smooth ones. These weapons 

 must have been used as wedges, and driven by mallets. They 

 never cut a forest tree down with one. Indeed the stone men med- 

 dled little with great trees, and they used fire when they did. They 

 made their stockades with living trees. For fire wood they col- 

 lected windfalls. It was a folly to see the prisoners and women 

 go leagues to collect dead wood, saith LesCarbot, when they were 

 living in the forest. On the other hand, tliey are well adapted to 

 splitting wood in all its forms, — to splitting bark from the birch 

 trees, and to scraping the raw skins, breaking the grain and form- 

 ing them into leather. When we find that the women did all these 

 matters, built canoes, platted mats, and skinned the game, we are 

 not surprised to find so many of them small, and running into hand 

 axes, or wedges. Many of them have a groove for the left hand 

 thumb to hold them by, when striking them with a mallet-head in 

 right. 



The corracle or boat built of wicker has ceased even in any tra- 

 dition, but should not be lost sight of as an ethnological fact, 

 connecting them with prehistoric men of the old world. I have 

 attempted to restore handles to some of these axes, from our know- 



* Joe Glode, an admirable hunter and Indian, now dead, once shot a moose in 

 the forest at Annapolis County, and having no knife, immediately took the flint 

 out of his gun, bled and dressed the carcase with it. The Indians were a long 

 time before they used percussion locks. The close cover and twigs of trees did 

 not suit their careless handling. " See good many Indians no fore finger now, 

 never saw them before cussion guns," was the sage remark of old Jack Glode. 



