Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/88

 ingenuity, could soon learn to copy one of the thousand specimens under his feet? It is well known that the art of making flints with a cold chisel, as practised on the continent of Europe, requires long practice and a knack in the operator; but the arrow-head is of much more irregular form, and, like the flint, can only be struck out by a succession of skilful blows.

An Indian to whom I once exhibited some arrow-heads (to whom they were as much objects of curiosity as to myself) suggested that, as many white men have but one blacksmith, so the Indians had one arrow-head-maker for many families. But there are marks of too many fingers—unless they were like travelling cobblers—to admit of this supposition. I have seen arrow-heads from the South Sea, precisely similar to those found here; so necessary and so little whimsical is the form of this little tool. So has the steel hatchet its prototype in the stone one of the Indian, as the stone hatchet its original in the necessities of man.

Venerable are these ancient arts whose history is lost in that of the race itself. Here, [40]