38 INTRODUCTION 
suddenly appear like an inventive mutation, but very slowly 
evolve as their usefulness is demonstrated by practice. 
The shaft is very rarely perforated at the base for the 
attachment of a line!; it is cylindrical (later flat) in form 
adapted to the capture of large fish in streams. The harpoons 
may possibly have been projected by means of the so-called 
propulseurs or dart throwers, which resemble the Eskimo and 
Australian implements of to-day. 
Amidst the clash of opinion as to the exact use and method 
of use of these weapons, my conclusion, admitttedly incapable 
of absolute proof, holds that the Paleolithic fisher owes to the 
hunter the inception of the chief weapon of his equipment, the 
Spear-Harpoon. 
Paul Broca’s dictum 2 that Man hunted before he fished 
seems, perhaps, despite Dall’s excavation of Eskimo débris,3 
to be borne out by Troglodyte records both positive and 
negative. The Gorge or bait-holder was employed by the 
hunter (according to some) even earlier than by the fisher. 
Gorges have been from time immemorial and still are in vogue 
in the Untersee for the capture of marine birds, as is the case 
to-day with the Eskimos of Norton Sound. 
From the chronicles of Rau, H. Philips, and others can be 
built a Table of Generations, or the story of how the Hunting 
Spear begat the Fishing Spear, which begat the Harpoon 
unilaterally barbed, which in turn begat the Harpoon bi- 
laterally barbed, until about the tenth or twentieth generation 
—one is appalled at the amount of Succession Duty which such 
1H. J. Osborne (op. cit., p. 385 ff.) states that, with the exception of one 
half-finished hole in a Harpoon from La Madelaine, the side hole for the 
attachment of the thong to the Harpoon does not appear in the French Magda- 
lenian Harpoon, although in those from Cantabria it is nearly always present. 
The Azilian weapon usually bears a hole, 
2 The Troglodytes of the Vézéve Valley, Smithsonian Report, 1872, p. 95. 
8 In Contributions to North American Ethnology, 1877, i. p. 43, Dall states 
that the débris of the heaps show tolerably uniform division into three stages, 
characterised by the food which formed the staple of subsistence and by the 
weapons for obtaining as well as the utensils for preparing the food. The 
stages are: ist, The Littoral period, represented by the Echinus layer ; 
2nd, The Fishing period, represented by the Fish-bone layer; 3rd, The 
Hunting period, represented by the Mammalian layer. This antecedence 
of fishing before hunting, if Dall be correct, was, I imagine, caused probably 
by local or climatic conditions in the Arctic Circle; it is not the general rule 
elsewhere. 
