Public Ledger

How Flint Arrow-heads Were Made.

Washington cor. Cleveland Leader.

A young scientist over in the Smithsonian Institute, named Cushing, has just made public the discovery of the method employed in making the stone and volcanic glass arrow-heads, daggers, knives, axes and razors of the pre-historic races. Up to this time this has been a great problem to all antiquarian students, but no theory has ever been advanced showing such practical results as Cushing's. He started to solve the difficulty by putting himself in the identical position of the Aztecs or Mound Builders—without having anything to work with except sticks, various shaped stones such as he could find on the banks of any stream, and his hands. After making some rude implements by chipping one flint with another, he discovered that no amount of chipping would produce surfaces like the best of those he was trying to imitate. He therefore came to the conclusion that there was another way of doing it, and, by chance, tried pressure with the point of a stick instead of chipping by blows of a stone: when, presto! he found that he could break stone, flint and obsidian in any shape he chose. Shortly he had made spear heads and daggers that would cut like a razor, as good as any he had before him, which had been picked up from all over the world. By a little more observation he found that the "flaking," which he calls his process, on the old arrow head left grooves that all turned one way. He produced a like result by turning his stick the easiest way from right to left. He therefore concludes that the prehistorics were right-handed people like ourselves. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that occasionally an arrow-head is found that has flakes running from left to right, showing a left-handed person. The importance of the discovery is that it shows the prehistorics to have been able to do this thing without the use of iron or bronze, a thing long doubted. These facts were given in a paper which he read before the Anthropological Society of the Smithsonian at its last meeting.