Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/131

Rh localities of these flint tools. In my excursions around Abbeville, I was accompanied by M. Boucher de Perthes, and during one of my explorations in the Amiens district, by Mr. Prestwich. The first time I entered the pits at St. Acheul, I obtained seventy flint instruments, all of them collected from the drift in the course of the preceding five or six weeks. The two prevailing forms of these tools are represented in the annexed figures 8 and 9, each of which are half the size of the originals; the first being the spear-headed form, varying in length from six to eight inches; the second, the oval form, which is not unlike some stone implements, used to this day as hatchets and tomahawks by natives of Australia, but with this difference, that the edge in the Australian weapons (as in the case of those called celts in Europe) has been produced by friction, whereas the cutting edge in the old tools of the Valley of the Somme was always gained by the simple fracture of the flint, and by the repetition of many dexterous blows.

The oval-shaped Australian weapons, however, differ in being sharpened at one end only. The other, though reduced by fracture to the same general form, is left rough, in which state it is fixed into a cleft stick, which serves as a handle. To this it is firmly bound by thin straps of opossum's hide. One of these tools, now in my possession, was given me by Mr. Farquharson of Haughton, who saw a native using it in 1854, on the Auburn river, in Burnet district, North Australia.

Out of more than a hundred flint implements which I obtained at St. Acheul, not a few had their edges more or less fractured or worn, either by use as instruments before they were buried in gravel, or by being rolled in the river's bed.

Some of these tools were probably used as weapons, both of war and of the chase, others to grub up roots, cut down trees, and scoop out canoes. Some of them may have served,