1879.] J. Cockburn—Wotes on Stone Implements. 135 
In connexion with the subject of stone celts, I may mention that it is 
not generally known that the natives of Upper Assam use a genuine metal 
celt at the present day. The only record I can find of a somewhat simi- 
lar implement is in the P. A. S. B. for 1871, p. 83, where a celt of this 
kind is spoken of as used in Arakan, fixed on a long bamboo handle. 
This simple but highly efficient Assamese axe somewhat resembles a 
modern African axe figured by Sir John Lubbock at p. 28 of the 8rd edition 
of Pre-historic Times, and is almost identical in principle with another 
modern African axe, fig. 256, p. 370, Cat. Ant. R. I. A. It consists 
of a moderately stout handle of a dark and heavy wood, slightly curved 
upward at the haft end, where it expands into a hard natural knot. Into 
this knot is inserted at an angle, a tapering chisel-like blade of iron 
about 2°25 in. wide at the cutting edge, tapering to a point, and about 
8in. long. An axe of this kind will stand three or four years of hard 
work without splitting, and the dexterous and efficient way in which it was 
used excited my admiration. A family or party consisting of five or six 
males will fell and clear three acres of dense forest in two months, 
working at leisure. I observed this kind of axe used from Dumduma to 
Saikwah Ghat on the Sadiya Road, in the hands of Muttucks, Ahoms and 
Miris. Occasionally these tribes take contracts from tea-planters to 
clear forest, and, I have been informed, prefer their own tools to the best 
English felling axes. On one occasion I myself had to fell a considerable 
sized tree near a clearance at Dollah, near Sadiya, for the purpose of ob- 
taining the eggs of a wood-pecker, and set to work with an English axe. 
The tree was quite 20 in. in diameter, and I had not gone two inches into the 
wood, when a man came up bearing one of these primitive axes, and volun- 
teered his assistance, refusing at the same time the proffer of my axe, on 
the grounds that it was unnecessarily weighty, too broad, and formed a 
thick and clumsy wedge. In a quarter of an hour he had the tree down, 
and in a short time more the glistening eggs were in my hand. This 
iron Assamese celt, which, if found elsewhere, severed from its handle, 
would be considered of quite the same type as the narrow bronze celts 
considered by some Antiquaries to have been chisels, suggests the reflec- 
tion that fig. 252 A. of the Out. Ant. R. I. A., which has been accepted 
all over the world as the method in which the flat wedge-shaped celt was 
handled, more particularly since its reproduction in Sir J. Lubbock’s popular 
and interesting work Pre-historic Times, (see p. 25, 2nd edition,) is not 
quite correct. 
In this figure the taper point and a proportion amounting to nearly 
one-fourth of the instrument, is seen projecting above the handle, while 
ily 
