THE STONE AGE PAST AND PRESENT. 195 



knives, etc. Taken as a whole, such a set of types would be 

 very unlike, for instance, to a set of chipped instruments be- 

 longing to the comparatively late period of the cromlechs in 

 France and England. But a comparison of particular tyi^es 

 with what is found elsewhere, breaks down any imaginary line 

 of severance between the men of the Drift and the rest of the 

 human species. The flake knives are very rude, but they are 

 like what a,re found elsewhere, and there is no break in the 

 series which ends in the beautiful specimens from Mexico and 

 Scandinavia. The Tasmanians sometimes used for cutting or 

 notching wood a very rude instrument. Eye-wdtnesses describe 

 how they would pick up a suitable flat stone, knock off" chips 

 from one side, partly or all round the edge, and use it without 

 more ado ; and there is a specimen corresponding exactly to 

 this description in the Taunton Museum. An implement found 

 in the Drift near Clermont would seem to be much like this. 

 The drift tools with a chipped curvilinear edge at one end, 

 which were probably used for dressing leather and other scrap- 

 ing, are a good deal like specimens from America. The leaf- 

 shaped instruments of the Drift diSer principally from those of 

 the Scandinavian shell-heaps, and of America, in being made 

 less neatly and by chipping off larger flakes ; and there are 

 leaf-shaped instruments which were used by the Mound-Builders 

 of North America, perhaps for fixing as teeth in a war-club in 

 Mexican fashion,^ which differ rather in finish than in shape 

 from the Drift specimens. Even the most special type of the 

 Drift, namely, the pointed tapering implement like a great 

 spear-head, differs from some American implements only in be- 

 ing much rougher and heavier. There have been found in Asia 

 stone implements resembling most closely the best marked of 

 the Drift types. Mr. J. E. Taylor, British Consul at Basrah, 

 obtained some years ago from the sun-dried brick mound of 

 Abu Shahrein in Southern Babylonia, two taper pointed instru 

 ments^ of chipped flint, which, to judge from a cast of one oi' 

 them, would be passed wdthout hesitation as drift implements. 

 As to the date to which these remarkable specimens belong, 



1 Squier & Davis, p. 211. 



- Vaux, in Proc. Soe. Ant., Jan. 19, 1860. 



2 



