THE STONE IMPLEMENTS. 
297 
tion was especially drawn to a tomahawk, or osquesont, used by the 
Iroquois, armed with a rude piece of obsidian. This latter, if 
found by itself, would have been passed by without notice; but 
hafted as it was in a wooden handle, the two formed a most 
formidable and death- dealing weapon. It was mentioned that 
savage man, whilst in his stone age, and unacquainted with the use 
of metals, made little progress ; but that with the discovery of 
copper, and probably also the art of hardening it so as to form 
articles that could be used, his advance commenced to go on 
rapidly, through the bronze to the age of iron, and thus to the 
present times of the highest civilization and refinement. The 
manner in which the holes were bored in stone implements was 
described, and mention was made that a professor at Zurich had 
shown how the holes in axe-hammers, and similar articles, which 
have perpendicular sides, and which could not have been bored by 
the ordinary method, could be pierced by means of a piece of soft 
cow-horn, armed with dry sand, which was made to rotate by means 
of a simple bow and string, cutting out well-defined cores of a cylin- 
drical form, many similar to which had been found in the Swiss 
lakes. 
There was exhibited a diagram of a tribulum or threshing-floor, 
lately brought from Cyprus, where it is the ordinary implement of 
farm use, and cost only 15s. at Larnaca. This was armed with 270 
flint flakes, identical in form and manufacture with those that 
occur in such numbers in the eastern counties of England ; and 
would seem to show that if somewhat similar implements were in 
use, as has been affirmed, by the early Eomans in Britain, these 
flakes may date back no further than about two thousand years. 
After giving some instances of folk lore, and remarking upon the 
superstitions that had been attached to arrow heads of stone in this 
country as well as abroad, the lecturer spoke briefly of the Devon- 
shire and Cornish implements, his concluding remarks being as 
follows : 
I can only now refer very casually to the implements found in 
Devon and Cornwall. These, as regards the Palaeolithic, have only 
been met with in the gravel beds at Broom, near Axminster, at 
Colyton, and in Kent's Cave and Brixham Cavern. Polished, or 
ground, implements have been found in many situations, but their 
number is few ; whilst the smaller flakes, scrapers, &c, can be 
gathered from many of the headlands of the two counties, not 
