IMPLEMENTS OF THE STONE AGE.

5

defence or attack. Observation and experience would soon lead him to some contrivance better than a mere missile, and to combine the stick and the stone into an artificial weapon. So, also, from bruising or crushing with a pebble, the transition is equally natural to a rude

hammer or hatchet, - the stone prepared, in some way, to receive a handle, or sharpened at one end to an edge, so that a blow could be struck to break or cut with careful limitations. In the first period of this early age, therefore, when man is supposed to have begun to learn that he had the faculty of invention which might make him superior to all other animals, are found the first rude weapons and implements, arrow-heads and spear-heads, knives, hatchets, hammers, and tools sharpened to edges of different shapes and for various purposes, all made of stone or bone, but all only roughly chipped, unground, and unpolished.

It must have taken generations, it may have taken centuries, before even this much of culture was secured by the man, whose wants were few, whose intellect was as feeble as the intellect of a modern child, but whose mere brute force of muscular strength and whose power of endurance were probably so great as alone to suffice, for the most part, to satisfy all his wants. Certainly, as the relics he has left behind him show, a long time elapsed before he much improved his condition. Slowly and gradually he added to the number of his tools, and improved upon their shape and capability. Among the most common

of these improved implements is what the antiquary calls a celt — celtis, a chisel - and which may have been used either as a chisel, a hatchet, or an adze; he contrived a scraper, with which he cleaned

Fig. 1, flint awl. 2, Swiss stone axe. 3, spear-head. 4, stone celt. 5, stone scraper. 6, bone awl.

7, stone dagger.

the adhering flesh from the skins of the beasts he killed; he invented bodkins and needles of bone, to pass through them the sinews that served for thread when he made clothing of these skins; and he fashioned harpoons for fishing. To his offensive weapons he added daggers; his axe he improved in size and shape; and he cut jagged teeth in long flakes of flint for saws. Such of these implements as were for use once or twice only in war or in the chase, or for rough and infrequent purposes, he left still rudely chipped.

But with the exercise of the inventive power came the sense of beauty, the consciousness of increased effectiveness in the perfection of a tool, and perhaps the development of a new satisfaction in the permanent possession of personal property of his own creation. Then he was no longer content with the rough pebble that he picked up on the beach, but sought for better material; he studied the grain and the cleavage of different flints and obsidians; bestowed time.

Earliest Pottery.

THE PRIMITIVE MAN.

7

and much labor upon the perfecting of his implements; contrived new and more convenient handles; gave grace and outline to their shapes; ground their edges to keen sharpness, and polished them with studious care. So in the lapse of centuries he attained at length to the age of Polished Stone. With it come the first evidences of the manufacture of a rude pottery, learned, perhaps, by some observant savage from the accidental baking of clay, who conceived therefrom a better drinkingcup, or vessel to hold his food, than a clam-shell or the hollow of his hand.1

Drinking-cup.

From all the varied relics of the man of the early, and so far as is yet known the earliest epoch, the ethnologist has deduced His mode of that he was of small brains, retreating forehead, projecting life. jaws, low in intellect, but of great strength of bone and muscle, which enabled him to encounter and overcome the formidable dangers of his time. He lived near the sea-shore or on the banks of lakes and rivers, from which he drew, in part, his subsistence. A hunter and fisherman, compelled to a constant struggle for bare subsistence, he did not at first cultivate the earth, and it is doubted if even he bestowed much labor upon gathering the fruits and vegetables which nature unassisted might have afforded him. His food was flesh; the incisors of the jaws that have been found are, like those of the Esquimaux of the present day, worn smooth, and it is surmised that, like that people, he preferred to eat raw-perhaps because he was slow in learning how to cook the flesh of the animals he killed. His front teeth did not overlap as ours do, but met one another like those of the Greenlanders, and he could therefore the more easily tear and gnaw the flesh from the bones.2 Sometimes on the bones of children, as well as of adults, the marks of such human teeth have been observed, and it is supposed that failing other food, he fed, not only upon his enemies whom he killed in battle, but upon those whom he could only be led to eat by the extremity of hunger or the mere fondness for human flesh. But he was not always a cannibal, or at least the testimony to this propensity is not always present among the other evidences of his way of life. The skins of the beasts he killed in the chase or trapped, perhaps served for tents, and no doubt for clothing; their flesh and the marrow of their bones, for which he seems to have had a special fondness, were his food. These skins he dressed with his unpolished stone scraper, shaped them with his stone knife, sewed them with

1 See Tylor, Lubbock, Lyell, Vogt, Dawkins, Gustaldi, Busk, Keller, Figuier, et al. 2 Pre-historic Times. By Sir John Lubbock.

threads of sinews in needles of bone. A flatness or compression of the shin-bone, differing from the shape of the tibia of civilized man, is sometimes found, which permitted, it is suggested, of a disposition of the muscles peculiarly adapted to men living by hunting in a rough and mountainous country. He found a shelter at first in natural caves, and in huts of the simplest construction, partly because the convulsions of nature, however gradual they may have been, were still too frequent and too tremendous to admit of any pretermission of the struggle with the elements by which alone he could maintain existence; or to leave any leisure for the development of the architectural faculty.

Unground

To the beginning of that remote and long continued epoch has been given the name of the Stone Age, because then men and Ground had only learned to fashion from the pebbles they picked up Stone Ages. at their feet, a rude weapon for warfare or a ruder implement for domestic use. And this era of the childhood of the race is divided into two periods, the Unground Stone Age (Palæolithic), and the Ground Stone (Neolithic) Age. But the dividing line between

1 See Broca upon the Ossemens des Azies; Busk on Human Remains, etc., in the Caves of Gibraltar. Report of the International Congress of Pre-historic Archæology, 1868; Dawkins' Cave Hunting, London, 1874.

THE LAKE-DWELLERS.

6

these two periods is so vague and uncertain that it is thought by some impossible to define it in any other way than by the recurrence of a second glacial era when all Europe was wrapped in an Arctic winter, and buried in Arctic ice, probably for hundreds of years.1

1

At any rate a long period passed away before these rude men learned to grind and polish the stones which at first they only chipped, and it is doubted if their stone axes were pierced to receive a handle till working in metals in later times had taught them a method for the process. For the Stone Age overlapped the Bronze, and even when they had come to know how to smelt copper and had learned that nine parts of that metal to one of tin would make a combination hard enough for a useful tool, or sword, or spear, they

Bronze Implements.

long held to their old imple- Fig. 1, celt. 2, bronze hair-pin (Swiss). 3, bronze razor ments of stone, no doubt, be- knife-blade (Dennak). 4, bronze knife-blade (Danish.) cause of the cost of material and slow growth of skill. But when man began to smelt ores he began to make history; and there is a visible

connection between the Bronze Age and our own, in traditions, oral and written, in inscriptions upon sculptured stones, in picturewriting in temples and on ancient mona

ments.

The Lake-dwellers, however, though some of them were in the condition of the earliest Stone Age, were generally of that more recent period when the continent had settled into its present form; their population was numerous enough to gather into communities sufficient for the felling of trees with their stone axes; these trees, sharpened with the aid of fire, they drove into the muddy bottoms of the lakes as piles for the support of the platforms of their houses. With their relics, in beds three feet in thickness, the accumulation of centuries, are found the first evidences of agriculture and horticulture. Among the charred remains

Sculptured Stone.

1 The Great Ice Age; and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man. By James Geikie. 1874.