422 [Proc. B.N.F.O.. 



in the British Islands. A second axe is 14 inches long, 4^ 

 inches broad, and weighs 7 lbs. This specimen, and one slightly 

 smaller, were found together in the townland of Knockans, 

 sticking in the ground, with their edge downwards, and as the 

 finder remarked, "just as they had dropped from the sky," thus 

 illustrating by his remark the popular belief that stone axes are 

 thunderbolts. The axes are of all degrees of finish and of all 

 sizes from those mentioned down tO' less than an ounce in 

 weight. Of other kinds of objects there are stones with 

 pointed ends, called picks ; some with side edges that may be 

 called choppers or skinners, some oval implements, and some 

 almost circular. Longish flakes were dressed into points, and 

 scrapers were made from, flakes with both broad and narrow 

 scraping edges. The flakes, which are very numerous, are, as 

 a rule, short and broad. They were all evidently the waste 

 material occurring in the making of the axes, yet many of them 

 show signs of use in both cutting and scraping, and some of 

 them had been specially prepared for such purposes by 

 secondary working along the .edges. A few long flakes were 

 found, one being 8| inches, rather unusually long for an Irish 

 flake. About 200 hammer-stones were found, the majority of 

 them made out of waste pieces of rock, but more or less rounded 

 by constant hammering ; others were of waterworn pebbles of 

 quartzite. The full total of objects collected by the author 

 exceeds 4,000. The axes which have undergone grinding must 

 have been ground on the old red sandstone which appears in 

 the lower part of the valley, possibly where it is exposed in beds 

 of streams, but no' special portion of rock showing grooves, 

 such as one would expect to- see where grinding had taken 

 place, has yet been observed. The rock, of which the 

 larger number of implements has been formed, would appear to 

 be a metamorphic rock foreign to the district. It occurs in 

 the form of natural boulders covered with strige. It is of 

 bluish black colour, very fine and close in the grain, and has a 

 conch oidal fracture quite equal to flint. Professor Cole, to 

 whom I submitted specimens, takes the rock to be "an altered, 

 fine-grained diorite, which has been penetrated late in its history 



