finds it difficult to suggest to what use they could have been 
applied * The imagination of Professor Nilsson, however 
masters this difficulty; he says : “The very small specimens 
which are sometimes to be met with, resembling the large ones 
m everything but their size, and which have likewise been 
regarded as symbols, if they were not ornaments, were perhaps 
made for boys, to give them an early training in the use of 
arms.”+ Mr. Evans adopts the same opinion ; of the American 
stone implements he says : “ They were made of various sizes, 
the smaller for boys, and those for men varying in accordance 
v i tli the purpose to which they were to be applied. And 
these bald assertions, these childish trivialities, are now re- 
ceived as the deductions of high science in support of high 
antiquity. 
But, again ; some four or five of the other flints are simply 
pebbles, or water-worn pieces of broken flint, such as might be 
picked up on a beach, or from the newly-spread metalling of a 
road ; and most men of intelligence who (to use the words of 
Di . Carpenter) have that trained and organized common 
sense which we call scientific method,” would reject the con- 
clusion that they are human implements. 
The remainder of these cavern flints are flakes and splinters 
of flint ; the flakes are few, fragmentary, and most imperfect 
in size and form, and as knives far inferior to some of the sub- 
soil flakes, the natural origin of which I have shown in a 
former paper, where I have adduced good evidence to prove 
that such flakes have had a geological and not an antiquarian 
origin— that a flake is the result of the natural fracture of the 
flint, and that a nodule of flint mechanically crushed by a stone- 
breaker produces as perfect flakes as are now referred to human 
workmanship. 
In addition to this evidence before produced, of the natural 
formation of the flakes, I am now enabled to show that change 
of temperature will split flints, and other silicious minerals 
having a similar fracture, into flakes, knives, and scrapers. 
The black slag from the tin and iron smelting-works of 
Cornwall is a coarse kind of obsidian ; rejected from the works 
at a high temperature, it breaks with a decided conchoidal 
fracture in the act of cooling into fragments, from which flakes 
and spear-points may be selected, in every respect resembling 
the so-called flint implements of the caverns ; and the perfec- 
* A ncient Stone Implements, p. 249. 
t Nilsson on the Stone Age, p. 99. 1868. 
+ Ancient Stone Implements , p. 362. 1872. 
