FOSSIL FLINT IMPLEMENTS. 



27 



Figs. 38, 39 — Forgeries 

 Flint Implements. 



of 



tusks, or horns, but they use no auxiliary instrument. A monkey may tear 

 down a branch of a tree, or cast a stone, but it makes not a club of the one, 

 nor trims the other for a sling, an arrow, or a spear. The second, but still a 

 most material evidence is afforded by the manner or method of the workman- 

 ship employed in producing certain definite forms of implements. Let us first 

 take the larger pear-shaped and spear-shaped instruments. A large flint has 

 been here taken from the chalk itself, sometimes from a gravel-heap, and by a 

 series of chippings from the outer part or sides the desired pointed, spear- or 

 pear-shape is attained. If we see these chippings in a stone barbed arrow- 

 head from a Celtic grave or a tumulus, no one disputes its human work- 

 manship any more than anyone disputes that 

 of one of the well-known Yorkshire forgeries. But 

 because it is asserted these fossil implements come 

 from stratified deposits of geological age, there 

 spring up directly voices which in loud language 

 ignore the efforts of the hand of man and attribute 

 — too commonly without the slightest knowledge of 

 the implements themselves, the natural fracturage of 

 flint, or the nature of the circumstances under which 

 the geological formations were deposited — their re- 

 gular and definite forms to the attrition of the flints 

 with each other by the influence of waves or currents of water. Anyone who 

 will take the trouble to chip off a flake from an ordinary flint nodule will see 



that the fracture gives a series of 

 concentric arcs one beyond the other, 

 the convexity of which always points 

 in the direction in which the blow 

 was struck. Anyone looking at one 

 of these fossil implements will see 

 the fracture of the separate flakes 

 plainly marked out by these lines of 

 concentric arcs and undulations, and 

 will as plainly see that these flakings have all been made by blows given at 

 the sides, and are broken out, because the lines of fracture all point from the 

 outer edges or sides towards the central ridge (see fig. 1, p. 405, vol. iii., or 

 figs. 5 — 9, 16, 17, vol. iv.) just as they would do if wrought by the hand of man 

 into a designed and given shape, but as they never would be from casual and 

 chance blows, which would necessarily strike in all directions just as accidentally 

 might happen. The chippings of the flints, if by design, would be regular and 

 systematic, wliich they are ; if by natural causes, irregular and unsystematic, 

 which they are not. 



Moreover, the flints of which these instruments are made have been selected— 

 those of a firm unfractured substance have been chosen. Everyone acquainted 

 with chalk districts or pebble-beaches knows how few flints are firm and solid 

 compared with those which present more or less numerous fine divisional planes 

 of fissure, and how readily these latter fall to pieces at a slight blow of the 

 hammer. We find none of these fossil instruments formed of the shatterable 

 flints, which, if accident formed these instruments, should not have been ex- 

 cluded from the formative chipping processes"; on the other hand, we find 

 these fossil instruments formed of remarkably hard and compact nodules, such 

 as were likely at most only to have been battered and pitted by the waves, but 

 which could only have been flaked by definite and appropriate blows struck by 

 the hand of man. 



We need not again speak of ^design exhibited in the fossil flint knives, arrow- 

 heads and javelin-points, about which no doubt could arise in the minds of those 



Fig-. 40. — Concentric Lines of Fracture in Flints. 



