198 THE STONE AGE — PAST AND PRESENT. 



To turn now to the productions of tlie higher or Ground 

 Stone Age, grinding is found rather to supplement chipping 

 than to supersede it. Implements are very commonly chipped 

 into shape before they are ground, and unfinished articles of this 

 kind are often found. Moreover, such thino^s as flake-knives, 

 and heads for spears and arrows, have seldom or never been 

 ground in any period, early or late, for the obvious reason that 

 the labour of grinding them would have been wasted, or worse. 

 Flake-knives of obsidian appear to have been sometimes 

 finished by grinding in Mexico,^ but most stone knives of the 

 kind seem to have been used as they were flaked off. This 

 question of grinding or not grinding stone implements is 

 brought out clearly by some remarks of Captain Cook's, on his 

 first voyage to the South Seas. He noticed that the natives of 

 Tahiti used basalt to make their adzes of, and these it was ne- 

 cessary to sharpen almost eveiy minute, for which purpose a 

 stone and a cocoa-nut shell full of water were kept always at 

 hand. When he saw the New Zealanders using, for the finish- 

 ing of their nicest work, small tools of jasper, chipped ofi'from 

 a block in sharp angular pieces like a gunflint, and throwing 

 them away as soon as they were blunted, he concluded they 

 did not grind them afresh because they could not." This, how- 

 ever, was not the true reason, as their grinding jade and other 

 hard stones clearly shows j but it was simply easier to make 

 new ones than to grind the old. A good set of implements of 

 the Ground Stone Age will consist partly of instruments made 

 by mere chipping, such as varieties of spear-heads, arrow-heads, 

 and flake-knives, and partly of ground implements, the principal 

 classes of which are celts, axes, and hammers. 



The word celt (Latin celtis, a chisel) is a convenient term 

 for including the immense mass of instruments which have the 

 simple shape of chisels, and might have been used as such. No 

 doubt many or most of them were really for mounting on han- 

 dles, and using as adzes or axes; but in the absence of a han- 

 dle, or a place for one, or a mark where one has been, it is often 

 impossible to set down any particular specimen as certainly 



' Torquemada, 'Monarquia Indiana;' Seville, 1615, vol. ii. p. 527. 

 = Cook, First Toy. H.j vol. ii. p. 220 ; vol. iii. p. 60. 



