FLINT FLAKES OF DEVON AND CORNWALL. 
171 
sources of weakness to the vessel. Further evidence of fire is 
apparent in the presence of small fragments of charcoal, as also 
in that of numerous specimens of flint flakes, that have evidently 
been under the action of fire. A portion of a long bone, that is, 
by all anatomists who have seen it, believed to be human, being 
a portion of the tibia, assists, with the preceding recorded facts, 
severally to afford presumptive evidence that the spot on which 
they were found is in the neighbourhood where a colony of per- 
sons, the manufacturers of these implements, existed. 
I have said that it is the site of the manufactory of these 
flakes, from the circumstance that with those that can be 
pronounced useful as knives, scrapers, awls, or arrow-heads, 
there are a large number of flakes and chipped flints that can 
only be the waste fragments struck off in the process of their 
manufacture, together with numerous fractured nodules of flint 
from which evidently smaller specimens have been broken, 
being the cores from which the knives and arrow-heads were 
made. These cores are tolerably abundant, according to my 
own observation, and, with that of Mr. Hall, as at 144 to 1,000 
of the other flint specimens. The study of a great number of 
these cores shows that they invariably have a portion of one 
extremity first struck off, and at this flattened extremity the 
percussion is given that fractures off the several fragments, 
until a prominent angle is produced, which, upon being struck 
off, yields a flake that is broad at the base, and as the force ©f 
the blow dies out, the fracture thins out towards the opposite 
extremity into a sharp point, coinciding with the angle or corner 
of the core from which the flake is broken. Other shapes, such 
as scrapers and knives, are made, frequently the result of 
accident, but, no doubt, in practised hands, the effort of well- 
designed skill. 
It is probably to many a matter of doubt how such arrow- 
heads could have been made with such rude implements, as the 
hammer stones that have been found with them must have been. 
Undoubtedly, to us, who require iron to be converted into steel 
before it is available for use in the construction of tools, it may 
be a source of wonder how these things were done ; but a little 
experience will demonstrate that, while the fracture of a piece 
of flint into any given shape, with rounded stones and blunt 
hammers, is difficult, yet, with a tolerably sharp implement of 
fractured flint with a somewhat cutting edge, the thing is not 
only practicable, but easily fulfilled. 
Mr. Whitley and Mr. Hall, who have recorded their opinions 
on the flint flakes of Baggy Point, state that et flint is not found 
naturally in that part of North Devon, as there is no chalk 
nearer than seventy miles, and greensand, with flint, occurs 
only in two fields at Orleigh Court, in the parish of Buckland 
