1 6 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



proper points, and small pieces being chipped off by pressing it in 

 different directions. Some hold the stone in the hand, setting the tool 

 at different points and angles, while an assistant gently strikes it. 

 Pincers are sometimes used, and the Klamath indians hold the 

 wooden handle of the flaker under the arm, pressing the stone against 

 the point. A long flat tool, found in Great Britain, was thought a 

 flaking implement by Mr Evans, but the same stone article is here 

 either a scraper or knife. 



The time required in arrow making differs according to the size 

 or delicacy of the article to be made. In his account of the indians 

 of Virginia, in 1607, Capt. John Smith said, ' His arrow-head he 

 maketh quickly, with a little bone, of any splinter of stone or glass.' 

 Evans said that the Mexicans could turn out a hundred obsidian 

 knives in an hour, but these were probably only long and sharp 

 flakes, often made at a single stroke. Crook, however, states that the 

 indians of the plains will make from fifty to a hundred arrows in an 

 hour, with a knife for a flaker. These must be rude, however ser- 

 viceable. A Klamath indian made a complete arrow-head in five 

 minutes, and a Shasta indian took an hour for this. On articles of 

 extraordinary delicacy and size, many days might be employed. 



Mr Frank H. Cushing, in his address upon the arrow, at the 

 Springfield 'meeting of the American association for the advance- 

 ment of science in 1895, gave an interesting account of his own 

 experience in arrow making. In a boyish experiment he stumbled 

 upon the use of the bone flaker, by which he at once chipped the 

 flint ' in long, continuously narrow surface flakes wherever the edge 

 was caught in the bone at a certain angle.' His experience proved to 

 him ' that paleolithic man, of the French caves at least — that man 

 who is said to have known no other art of working stone than by 

 rudely breaking it into shape by blows of other stones — could not 

 have existed in such primary status of art for more than a few seasons 

 at most.' (See Proc. A. A. A. S. 1895. p. 205) 



Before he went to the Smithsonian institution or to Zuni, he had 

 elaborated ' some seven or eight totally distinct methods of working 

 flint-like substances with stone age apparatus.' His whole account 

 is worthy of careful study, and to him we are indebted for the know- 



