1896.] Piney Branch (D. C.) Quarry Workshop. 881 
he could not have spoken with greater positiveness and more 
certainty of knowledge. One might almost be pardoned, if he 
continued the reading to the foot of page 13, for believing that 
the writer considered himself not only omniscient but omni- 
present. For he says, “ That every implement resembling the 
final form, made from a boulder or similar bit of rock, must 
pass through the same, or much the same stages of development 
just described, whether shaped to-day, yesterday or a million 
years ago, whether in the hands of the civilized, the barbarian 
or the savage man.” 
I envy Mr. Holmes his confidence in his acquaintance 
with the times and men of high antiquity. Such intimate 
acquaintance with abstruse and unknown problems is equail- 
ed only by Dr. Jock Hornbook’s acquaintance with med- 
icine and knowledge of drugs; and he repeats this assump- 
tion when he says, “There were no examples of successful 
quarry-products left upon the ground, all forms available 
for further shaping or for immediate use were carried away, 
being the entire products of the shop, and the only reward for the 
long-continued and arduous labor inyolved in their produc- 
tion.” 
In the same strain, in the next paragraph, p. 14, he urges 
us to keep these facts clearly in mind and then says “it is 
almost superfluous to expend words in showing that all forms 
found in the workshop other than the thin blade, accidentally 
lost, are mere waste,” and he declares with a heroic “pang 0 
regret ” that he is compelled to drop the turtle-back, single or 
double, wholly and forever from the category of implements _ 
and to consign it to the oblivion of “failures.” And, as if to 
make an end to the discussion and settle the question forever, 
he, in the next sentence, extends his denunciation to all similar 
forms throughout the Potomac Valley. We should “ cast them 
at once and without hesitation into the refuse.” 
In the same manner, and with similar sentences, he settles 
and decides in an off-hand manner, as though it rested upon 
some great.and well-known law and well demonstrated evi- 
dence, the very question at issue, and considers that his dis- 
covery has put it beyond the pale of intelligent discussion. 
