Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/264

242 the same face. Though very similar to the hollows on the hammer-stones, they are due to a very different cause, being merely the results of stone bearings or journals having been employed, instead of those of brass, for the upright spindles of corn mills. It seems strange that for such a purpose stone should have gone out of use, it being retained, and indeed regarded as almost indispensable for durability, in the case of watches, the pivot-holes of which are so frequently "jewelled."

Fig. 162, which I have reproduced from the Sussex Archæological Collections on the same scale as the other figures, shows a pivot-stone of quartzite (?) found in the ruins of St. Botolph's Priory, Pembrokeshire, a few yards from a pebble (4 inches) of similar material, in which a hole had been bored to the depth of half an inch apparently by the friction of the pointed end of the smaller pebble. Another pivot-stone of the same kind was found at Bochym, Cornwall. Such socket-stones were, until recently, in use in Scotland and Piedmont for the iron spindles of the upper mill-stones of small watermills. Pivot-stones with larger socket-stones were also used for field-gates. Similar socket-stones occur in Switzerland, and have puzzled Dr. Keller.

A stone, with a well-polished cavity, found on the site of an old mill near Carluke, Lanarkshire, was exhibited at Edinburgh in 1856. Another was found in Argyllshire; and I have seen other specimens from Ireland. The socket of the hinge of the great gate at Dunnottar Castle is said to have consisted of a similar stone. Stones with highly-polished hollows in them, in which apparently the ends of drill-sticks revolved, are common on the site of ancient Naukratis.

As has already been observed at page 223, it is by no means uncommon to find portions of polished celts which, after the edge has been by some means broken away, have been converted into hammers. Very rarely, there is a cup-like cavity worked on either face in the same manner as in the celts shown in Figs. 87 and 88. A specimen of this character, from the neighbourhood of Bridlington, is shown in Fig. 163. It is of close-grained greenstone, and, to judge from the thickness of the battered end, the celt, of which this originally formed the butt, must have been at least half as long again as it is in its present form. The cavities have been worked out with some kind of pick or pointed tool, and from their position so near the butt-end, it seems probable that they did