Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/208

198 The stone implements of the Scandinavian shell-heaps are a good deal like those of the Drift and the Caves, as regards their flint-flakes and leaf-shaped instruments, hut they are characterized by the frequent occurrence of a kind of celt which is not a Drift type. It is rudely shaped from the flint, the natural fracture of which gives it a curved form which may be roughly compared to that of a man's front tooth, if it tapered from root to edge. Here, also, the Unground Stone Age prevails, though a very few specimens of higher types have been found. I may quote Mr. Christy's opinion that the thousands of characteristic implements are to be taken as the standard of what was made and used, while, as has very often happened in old deposits lying in accessible situations, a few things may have got in in comparatively modern times.

Beside the want of grinding, the average quality of the instruments of the Unground Stone Age is very low, notwithstanding that its best specimens are far above the level of the worst of the later period. These combined characters of rudeness and the absence of grinding give the remains of the Unground Stone Age an extremely important bearing on the history of Civilization, from the way in which they bring together evidence of great rudeness and great antiquity. The antiquity of the Drift implements is, as has been said, proved by direct geological evidence. The Cave implements, even of the reindeer period, are proved by their fauna to be earlier, as they are seen at a glance to be ruder, than those of the cromlech period and of the earliest lake-dwellings of Switzerland, both belonging to the Ground Stone Age. To the student who views Human Civilization as in the main an upward development, a more fit starting point could scarcely be offered than this wide and well-marked progress from an earlier and lower, to a later and higher, stage of the history of human art.

To turn now to the productions of the higher or Ground Stone Age, grinding is found rather to supplement chipping than to supersede it. Implements are very commonly chipped into shape before they are ground, and unfinished articles of this kind are