Minutes of Proceedings. 285 



Monday Evening, December 8, 1884. 

 SiE Samuel Peegtjson, q.c, ll.d., President, in the Chair. 



Lieutenant- General Sankey, c.b., was elected a Member of the 

 Academy. 



Mr. John E. Garstin, f.s.a., read a Paper on the Sixteenth Cen- 

 tury Inscriptions in Leighlin Cathedral, in memory of Bishops, &c. 



Dr. P. J. B. Quinlan, read some JN'otes of a Eecent Visit to the Anti- 

 quarian Museums of Copenhagen and Stockholm, over which he had 

 the advantage of being shown by Messrs. Worsaae and Oscar Mon- 

 telius. He noted a polished stone fish-hook in Copenhagen, the size of 

 an ordinary ling-hook, made of smooth, polished, dark stone, perfectly 

 barbed and pointed : in fact, but for being thicker in scantling, it 

 would form a complete match to its modern representative. "While 

 the manner in which the stone hatchets of hard flint were sharpened 

 and polished is known to all, and we possess the stone polishing 

 blocks on which the operation was accomplished by the aid of sand 

 and water ; it was a mystery how prehistoric people, possessing 

 neither bronze, iron, nor any other metal, drilled through the hard 

 flint the sharply defined and beautifully polished cylindrical hole in 

 which the wooden handle of the axe or the hammer was to be in- 

 serted. In the Swedish collection are the relics of a hatchet and 

 hammer factory, where the work was suddenly interrupted, and where 

 the unfinished flint implements were left in all stages of their manu- 

 facture. The inspection of these unfinished implements aft'ords a 

 simple explanation of how the hole was drilled. The hammer or axe 

 having been polished was fixed upon a solid stone bed by means of 

 cement ; and the operator, now taking a cylindrical hollow drill of 

 wood, commenced working on the flint implement. The hollow of the 

 drill was filled with fine sand, through which water was made to 

 flow, and the drill was kept working on the flint by means of a bow. 

 As it turned, the sand washed out between the wood and the flint ; 

 and this cutting process was in fact analogous to our present mode of 

 cutting marble blocks into slabs by a saw, sand and water, or to the 

 cutting of diamonds through the medium of soft iron with diamond 

 dust and oil. The process is completely illustrated in the Stockholm 

 Museum, and there are hammers and hatchets in every stage, from a 

 shallow circular mark down to the almost completed result. 



