326 



Notes arid Commcjits. 



LITTLE LINXOLXSHIRE MEN OF YEARS AGO. 



The Rev. A. Hunt has issued a paper deahng with ' The 

 Pvgmv Fhnt Age in Lincolnshire,' which he calls ' a contribu- 

 tion to the ethnology of Lincolnshire,' though it does not appear 

 to contain much ethnolog3\ We have perused it carefully, 

 but have failed to find that any of the objections to the so- 

 called ' p3'gmy man age,' which have from time to time been 

 raised in these pages, have been met ; and the main evidence 

 in the Rev. A. Hunt's address seems to be his appeal to the 

 authority of the ' great ' specialists he quotes, after apparently 

 having viewed them through a microscope. As usual with these 

 pygmy papers, it is illustrated by a photograph of some flakes, 

 at a considerably reduced scale. The ' twenty and thirty 

 different chips,' which occur on half an inch of the edge of a 

 specimen, do not necessarily prove ' extraordinary keen sight 

 in those who made them,' as a blind man could copy them 

 exactly if he simply scraped a sharp flint edge along a piece of 

 wood, such as the ' pygmy men ' might often have done in 

 fashioning a bow^ or straightening an arrow. 



THEIR WEAPONS. 



Amongst the proofs given that the ' pygmy flints ' are the 

 work of mankind, we learn that (a) the choncoidal [sic] fracture 

 runs down the length of the flint, and {h) ' the patina or skin, 

 the result of weathering or exposure.' The latter can be found 

 on any fxint on the fields, and is no more proof that it is due to 

 human handiw^ork than are the three-penny pieces, which the 

 author gets in his collection on a Sunday, evidence that his con- 

 gregation consists of pygmy men and w^omen with pygmy 

 pockets. The theory that ' the Pygmy flints of Scunthorpe 

 are the work of a migrating people, who passed over from India 

 through Asia and Europe to Britain ' is nearly as absurd as a 

 previous theory advanced by a ' great specialist,' viz., that 

 these people sailed from India, and came up the Humber in 

 boats. 



THEIR CLOTHING, 



In dealing with the question ' by what class of people were 

 these implements made,' we get a fair sample of this ' contribu- 

 tions to ethnology.' They are thought to have had keen vision, 

 for the reason already given ; they were clever designers, because 

 the same shapes of flints are reproduced in hundreds of in- 

 stances ! For^the same reason they were careful i.'ovkers, and 



Naturalist, 



