Page:Excavations at the Kesslerloch.djvu/53

Rh on both sides, undoubtedly indicate a greater amount of skill, and must have been move effective than the others, as they would remain fixed in the body of the animal for a longer time. Unfortunately not a single specimen is entirely perfect; they are all defective either at one end or the other (Plate VITI. fig. 47). The specimen of this kind which is in the best state of preservation is drawn, Plate VI. fig. 25: it is about six inches long, and about a third of an inch wide; it has seven whole barbs, and one broken off; all of them are made just like those of the harpoon first described; they stand opposite to one another, and are oblique, so as to enter more easily into the body of the animal struck. Both on the upper and under sides there is an ornamentation consisting of several double straight lines placed obliquely. The four remaining examples of this class have no essential peculiarities, one of them is drawn (Plate XIV. fig. 94). It is evident that the harpoons were stuck in a shaft, and as, with a single exception, the part going into the shaft was pointed, I imagine that it was stuck into the porous part of the horn, into which the point could be forced with little trouble. Bat in order to prevent the harpoon when struck rebounding and pressing too deeply into the horn, and thus weakening the effect of the stroke, these points were very wisely made either ball-shaped or spade-shaped. It appears to me that the harpoons found in the Kesslerloch were exclusively used as missiles for birds. The especial use of the barbs was to make the harpoon fast in the flesh of the game, so that when it got up into the air, and was escaping, it was prevented from doing so by a string fastened to the barb, and so was captured. The cave-dwellers at St. Madeleine perforated the harpoon in order to fasten the string more easily to it, and the same thing is done by the Esquimaux of the present day. They use harpoons more especially in hunting seals.

It cannot be decided with any certainty how the arrows, lances, and harpoons were darted against the prey; probably these cave-dwellers, like the savages of the present day, used bows made of wood and catgut. The modern ' Snake-Indians,' with similar weapons, strike their prey thirty or forty paces off with great precision, and with such force that they can send their arrows through the body of a horse or a buffalo. If bows like these had been used by the inhabitants of the Kesslerloch it is evident that they could not have lasted till now, as the wood in the course of thousands of years must have decayed.

The fourth group consists of what are called scrapers, and