Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/209

Rh often found. Moreover, such things as flake-knives, and heads for spears and arrows, have seldom or never been ground in any period, early or late, for the obvious reason that the labour of grinding them would have been wasted, or worse. This question of grinding or not grinding stone implements is brought out clearly by some remarks of Captain Cook's, on his first voyage to the South Seas. He noticed that the natives of Tahiti used basalt to make their adzes of, and these it was necessary to sharpen almost every minute, for which purpose a stone and a coco-nut shell full of water were kept always at hand. When he saw the New Zealanders using, for the finishing of their nicest work, small tools of jasper, chipped off from a block in sharp angular pieces like a gunflint, and throwing them away as soon as they were blunted, he concluded they did not grind them afresh because they could not. This, however, was not the true reason, as their grinding jade and other hard stones clearly shows; but it was simply easier to make new ones than to grind the old. A good set of implements of the Ground Stone Age will consist partly of instruments made by mere chipping, such as varieties of spear-heads, arrow-heads, and flake-knives, and partly of ground implements, the principal classes of which are celts, axes, and hammers.

The word celt (Latin celtis, a chisel) is a convenient term for including the immense mass of instruments which have the simple shape of chisels, and might have been used as such. No doubt many or most of them were really for mounting on handles, and using as adzes or axes; but in the absence of a handle, or a place for one, or a mark where one has been, it is often impossible to set down any particular specimen as certainly a chisel, an axe, or an adze, When, however, the cutting edge is hollowed as in a gouge, it is no longer possible to use it as an axe, though it retains the other two possible uses of chisel and adze. The water-worn pebble, in which a natural edge has been made straighter and sharper by grinding, may be taken as the original and typical form of the celt. Rude South American tribes select suitable water-worn stones and rub down their edges, sometimes merely grasping them in the hand to use them, and sometimes