108 TlMEHRI. 
used would be, not axes, but picks, attached to handles 
and used as adzes, and perhaps also wedges, used as our 
modern cold chisels. No other tool is absolutely neces- 
sary ; and both these can be made of stone. They are, 
moreover, absolutely simple tools ; for a properly selected 
natural stone attached to a handle, may be used, without 
further fashioning, as the pick or adze, and it is yet easier 
to find a natural stone, to be used without even a han- 
dle, to serve as a wedge. When the art of working in 
stone was perfected, the natural pick-stone being shaped 
and polished, would become in all essentials an adze, 
the wedge a cold chisel. And when the use of metal 
was adopted, by a mere change of material, not essen- 
tially of form, the adze and cold chisel as we know them 
were produced. 
Where, as among many American tribes, the use of 
metal was not a natural development but was introduced 
by the early European explorers, there is of course a 
break in this history of the evolution of the adze and 
cold chisel. 
It may not be out of place to enquire next, whence 
and when arose the real axe. This is obviously a de- 
velopment, not of the picking instrument or adze, but 
of the splitting instrument or wedge. Indeed the chief 
essential difference between an axe and a wedge is 
merely this ; whereas the wedge has to be inserted in 
its cleft by the fingers, and, after it has been driven in, 
to the required depth, and forward by straight blows 
delivered with a mallet or some object used as a mallet, 
is then beaten to one side or the other by some additional 
heavy implement — a mere heavy stick will suffice, in 
the axe these two implements are combined, the wedge 
