366 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



quality, the people of the Stone Age in America were obliged to make 

 excavations into these deposits. The boulders were chipped up into 

 long thin blades on the spot; but such blades were not in reality 

 finished articles, but merely brought to this stage that they might be 

 more easily carried away than the boulders themselves to other sites 

 where they could be manufactured into spear-heads and arrow-points. 

 Among the refuse stuff left by the ancient Americans in the course of 

 theii^ excavations and manufacture, are boulders with one or two flakes 

 removed, and rejected because found to be Linsuitable, blades showing 

 too great a hump on one side (turtlebacks), or otherwise not working 

 true, and blades broken when nearing the finishing point, &c. Prom 

 these partially- wrought and broken specimens, Mr. Holmes has given 

 restorations, showing all the stages in the work, from the water-worn 

 pebble or boulder up to the blade, and from that to the most finely 

 barbed and tanged arrow-head. Flakes have been found in abundance, 

 but no examples are figui'ed. They are all the refuse of the manufac- 

 ture of implements, and it does not seem that there has been a produc- 

 tion of flakes, as in Ireland, for the sake of the flakes themselves ; nor 

 has it been observed whether any of the refuse flakes were used for 

 cutting or scraping purposes. 



The process of manufacture of these American implements has a 

 likeness to that which has been followed in the production of oui' Irish 

 stone celts ; but there is this difference, that when the Stone Age 

 folk of the Washington region got to a stage in the manxifacture 

 somewhat corresponding to oui- chipped celts they went further, and 

 made such objects into spear and arrow-heads. This manufacture of 

 arrow-points from leaf -blades, and each arrow-point being as a rule the 

 product of one boulder, is a thing that is new to us, and different to 

 the plan which has been followed in Ireland. I believe that the 

 method employed by the Americans of the Washington region, as 

 described by Mr. Holmes, cannot have been universal in North 

 America; as Mr. Gerard Fouke, in his paper on " Stone Art," in the 

 Thirteenth Eeport of the Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 173 and 174, 

 shows that scrapers were made from flakes, and that arrow-heads 

 made from flakes were frequently found. He flgures an example of 

 a spear-head formed by dressing a flake round the edges, and states 

 that implements similarly formed were found in " Central Ohio, JSTorth- 

 eastern Arkansas, Coosa Yalley, Alabama, Eastern Tennessee, and 

 Western ISTorth Carolina." I have a few American arrow-heads in my 

 own collection, and there are some among them which were un- 

 doubtedly made from flakes ; and I have a very good scraper, with 



