538 Aboriginal Stone-Drilling. [July, 
and he obtained now more favorable results, owing to the yield- 
ing substance of the horn, in which the sand became imbedded 
and acted like a file. “The objection,’ he says, “ that no drills 
made of this material have been discovered, is rendered invalid 
by the nature of the horns of bovines, which are totally dissolved 
in water in a comparatively short time.’ 
Methods like those employed by Dr. Keller, may have been 
practiced by the aborigines of this country; yet among the 
hundreds of bone and horn implements which have passed through 
my hands during my connection with the United States National 
Museum, not one exhibited the character of a hollow drill, and I 
am not aware that any of the collections of this country contains 
such a tool. But I must not omit to state what I learned in 1875 
from a Warm Spring Indian belonging to a delegation which had 
come to Washington for the purpose of transacting business with 
the Government. These Indians were well supplied with pipes, 
mostly made of alabaster, and shaped like the ordinary catlinite 
pipes. With some difficulty I obtained from one of them the in- 
formation that they drill the cavities of their pipes with bone 
tools, and, in order to strengthen his assertion, he led me to a 
case in the Museum in which objects of bone were exhibited. 
The cavities of their pipes, some of which were purchased from 
them, appear to have been produced by solid rather than hollow 
drills. According to Catlin, the pipes made of the material now 
named after him, are (or were) drilled by means of a wooden 
stick, in conjunction with sand and water. : 
In my account of drilling, referred to. in the beginning of this 
article, I should have stated with greater emphasis that, in illus- 
trating the possibility of perforating very hard stone by employ : 
ing a revolving stick and sand and water, I was far from under- 
rating the efficiency of a flint tool for drilling stone of less obdu- 
rate character. In operating with a well-pointed flint arrow-head, 
firmly set in the cleft end of a short stick, on a fragment of 4 
pierced tablet of tolerably hard slate, I produced in about half an 
hour a small perforation in no way distinguishable from one made 
by an aboriginal worker in stone, The perforations in these tab- 
lets are either conical or bi-conical, By drilling from both sides 
of the fragment I made one of bi-conical form; if I had continued 
‘Keller: Durchbohrung der Steinbeile, Hirschh kzeuge und anderer Gerithe 
aus den Pfahlbauten, in: Anzeiger fiir Schweizerische Alterthumskunde ; Zirrich, | 
Juni, 1870, S. 139-144. : 
