160 PERFORATED STONES. 



I also find in Mr. Powers, instructive and valuable volume on the Lab- 

 its of the California Indians the following references to the digging'-sticks 

 as now used. In his account of the Indians of the Eel River Mountains 

 (p. 130), he writes: "Armed with her 'woman-stick', the badge of her sex, 

 which is a pole about 6 feet long and 1 £ inches thick, sharpened and fire- 

 hardened at one end." Again, when writing of the Modok (p. 256), he 

 says: "With a small stick, fire-hardened at the end, a squaw will root out 

 a half bushel [of kais roots] or more in a day." 



From the foregoing it will be perceived that the digging-stick of the 

 present Indians is not weighted, and although one tribe may have had very 

 different methods of work from others adjoining, it seems hardly probable 

 that such an implement as a weighted digging-stick would have gone entirely 

 out of use in fifty to a hundred years, had it been common before then; 

 though the negative fact that the perforated stones are not now used at all 

 is no more an argument against their having been used as weights to 

 digging-sticks than for any other purpose. In connection with the form of 

 digging-stick described by Mr. Powers, the use of similar implements by 

 some of the Pacific Islanders is of interest, and I, therefore, quote the fol- 

 lowing from Sir John Lubbock's "Prehistoric Times": 



" The digging-sticks [of the Figians] are made of a young mangrove tree. They 

 are about the size of an ordinary hay-fork, and the lower end is tapered off on one 

 side after the shape of a quill toothpick. In digging this flattened side is kept down- 

 wards. When preparing a piece of ground for yams, a number of men are employed 

 divided into groups of three or four. Each man being furnished with a digging-stick, 

 they drive them into the ground so as to enclose a circle about two feet in diameter. 

 When by repeated strokes the sticks reach the depth of eighteen inches they are used as 

 levers, and the mass of soil between them is thus loosened and raised." — Page 455, quot- 

 ing from Williams, " Figi and the Figians," vol. 1, p. 63. 



The only instrument for tillage used by the Maories of New Zealand was "a long 

 narrow stake sharpened to an edge at one end, with a short piece fastened transversely 

 at a little distance above it, for the convenience of pressing it down with the foot." — 

 Page 462. 



The Tahitians for cultivating the ground " had instruments of hard wood, about 

 Ave feet long, narrow, with sharp edges and pointed." — Page 471. 



On Plate X, seventeen of the perforated stones from California are 



represented under Figs. 22 to 38, and on the upper half of the plate,* which 



'This plate wns arranged, as will be seen by the position of the pins upon which the stones were 

 hung when photographed, to be printed in such a manner as to make what is now the right side of the 



