17 
ingenuity. In the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy there are no less 
than 688 bronze celts, and they all vary in make, and Sir J. Lubbock says, 
“ Moreover it is a very remarkable fact, especially when we consider the 
great, I might say the immense, number of bronze celts which are found, that 
scarcely two of them have been cast in the same mould. ( Prehistoric 
Times, p. 166.) On the contrary, crystalline rocks break by nature into the 
same forms wherever found : thus the similarity of type in the drift flints is 
not a characteristic of the work of man, but it is of the work of nature. 
3rd. The Drift implements show no marks of having been used by man. 
It is supposed that some of these implements were used as weapons both of 
war and the chase, others to grub up roots, to cut down trees, to scoop out 
canoes, to cut holes in the ice, as wedges for splitting wood, and for grub- 
bing and tilling the ground ; in fact, as savages using stone implements in 
any age must have used them to supply their wants, the evidence of use im- 
pressed on the flints must therefore have been of much the same character 
in all ages. 
The cutting edge of the flakes generally shows the natural serrated fracture 
of the flint, and only in one instance have I found a flake ground into a 
chisel-like form at the end and polished by use ; this was, however, a surface 
implement. 
On the soil at the west of Menchecourt village, I found a flint celt of the 
true Stone age ; it had been ground into form, but the point was worn 
back by use, and on it was a long polished cavity about the size of a quill, 
as if it had been much used in rubbing a strip of leather into a rounded 
thong. 
After a detailed review of the Scandinavian tools, Nilsson says, “ These 
facts show that the above-mentioned stone objects have been employed as 
tools in everyday use, and that they have, while being so used, become worn, 
resharpened, and broken, and that the fragments have been made into other 
kinds of tools.” ( The Stone Age, p. 90.) 
Most of the drift “ tools,” on the contrary, have their edges so sharp that 
they show no marks of use, and it is then inferred that there must have been 
a manufactory on the spot. Others have their edges worn by being rolled 
in a river’s bed, or battered by the mass of gravel in which they are found. I 
obtained from the gravel-pits of the Somme thirty “ implements,” and in no 
case were the edges ground or polished, or bore any marks of having been 
used for any purpose whatever ; where the point was sharp from fracture, 
the edges at the sides were equally sharp from the same cause, and some of 
the specimens, partly rounded by being rolled in water, had their edges worn 
precisely to the same extent as the points, and the edges of all the split 
contiguous flints presented the same appearance. 
I have inspected a very large number of the Drift “ tools, ’ perhaps 1,000, 
and I say advisedly, that I have not seen one bearing the same indubitable 
marks of use as characterize the true stone implements of the Neolithic age, 
nor do I find in any of the various scientific journals mention made of any 
such evidence of use. Sir Charles Lyell does indeed venture to suggest that 
VOL. VIII. C 
