points and as awls. I know of one similar to Cut 7 which is made of stone. It is from the Orange Free State, whence also came the

In the inland districts shelters these piercing bone tools are not so well finished, and they may have been utilised for other purposes. The four Cuts on the upper right of Fig. 195 are flat, and these tools

may have been used for mat-making. They were found at a great depth in boring a well, in the Smithfield district of the Orange Free

These bone implements will be treated of respectively in the chapter dealing with the Shell-mounds, Kitchen-middens, Caves, or Rock-shelters in which they were discovered.

One thing is quite certain, and that is, that however skilful they may have been in the use of awls, the makers were not acquainted with threading the tool, whereas the Aurignacian and the Magdalenian manufactured an extremely well-finished bone needle with eye. One meets occasionally in the Rock-shelter where one or more of these bodkins occur, the whetting-stone used for sharpening the same, and the groove left leaves no doubt as to its purpose-see Cuts 2 and 13 of Fig. 185 in Pl. XXV.-and occasionally also we find on the face of rocks grooves similar to those represented in text-fig. 9, the resulting cause of which is obvious.

Text-fig. 10 represents the obverse and reverse of a sharpening stone for bodkins, which could, in spite of its size, have been portable, and, judging from its numerous grooves, it must have been a much-used part of the house furniture. It will be noticed that these grooves are all narrow and never straight; this conclusively shows that they were caused by the production of fine points only.

ARROW-TIPS.

One of the main purposes to which bone was put seems to have been the manufacture of arrows; its use for this purpose was perhaps more general than its employment for awl making.

The Bushman arrow consisted of a reed varying in length and also in size, notched at one end, and having inserted at the other a rounded piece of heavy bone; the part round the notch and that near the top being strengthened by lashings of fine sinew or gut. In the reed is inserted a rounded piece of heavy bone, more or less sharply pointed at each end, at the tip of which is fixed a triangular piece of iron kept in its place by a resinous cement. At a short distance from the bone part of the shaft is a quill barb, and the whole is besmeared from the iron tip to half the length of the bone shaft with a thick layer of what purports to be poison (see Cut 1 of Fig. 142, Pl. XVIII.). This barb assists in keeping the poisoned part in the wound if an attempt is made to dislodge the arrow, and the bone shaft comes off easily from the reed shaft. The triangular ironpiece comes off as readily from the tip of the bone part, and the extraction of the poisoned part becomes thus very difficult and permits of the greater diffusion of the poison in the circulatory system of the victim.

That the use of the triangular iron tip is comparatively recent

There were two kinds of bows and arrows, with quivers appropriate to the size of the latter. The long bow reaches a size of 1 m. 65 cm., the average height of a Bushman, and the arrow 82 cm. ; the short bow is less than 1 m. and the arrow 40 cm.

would seem to be proved by the illustration Fig. 142, where the arrows are respectively tipped with quartz and glass chips. In Cuts 2 and 3 of the same figure heavy wood has been used instead of bone. But this is an exception, due perhaps to special circumstances. It may be taken for granted that that part of the arrows was made of bone.

WHETSTONES.

These bone arrow pieces are, however, rarer than the awls, unless some of the cylindrical bone bodkins, which I take to have been awls, have been used as arrow-points, which is not improbable; but the grooved stones serving for reducing the piece of bone into the required shape are not uncommonly met with, and they complete the series of the South African neolithic (modern) industry.

The groove is always longitudinal; the shape of the stone itself extremely variable; and it may also be said of these stones that no two specimens are alike. That many formed part of the "kit" of the hunter is probable, as the care bestowed on some of them is great. Some have one groove only, Cuts 4, 5, 7, 8 of Fig. 171, Pl. XXIII.; others have two, Cut 6; Cut 3 shows three grooves on each side; the flat specimen, Cut 1, has several grooves on both faces. These grooves are too deep to admit of their having been used for fashioning sharply pointed awls.

It has been suggested that these utensils were arrow-straighteners. Not only is it forgotten that the shaft of a Bushman arrow is made of reed, and was therefore straight, but not one of the many examples examined by me has an absolutely straight groove, and this groove is never deep enough to accommodate the whole circumference of the reed-part of an arrow. Moreover, instead of being cylindrical and of the same diameter throughout, the ends are always pointed or narrower than the centre, and in most instances the centre of the groove is not cylindrical.

It is somewhat amusing to read of the " should have been " process. Thus Goch: "This is used to straighten bone and reed arrows, by heating the stone red-hot, and placing the arrow-shaft in the groove, then rubbing another hot pebble with pressure up and down it, and so taking out the twist of the reed." The author forgets to tell how the rubbing hot pebble was held.

The explanation given by Dunn would seem to be more plausible: "These stones are used by first heating them in the t fire, and then rubbing the fresh-cut reed along the groove until it is

* Journ. Anthr. Inst., xi., pts. 1 and 2, 1881.
Trans. S. Afric. Phil. Soc., ii., 1880, p. 20.

rendered sufficiently straight." But he proceeds to figure two such portable stones the groove of which, owing to the tapering at each end and greater depth in the centre, could not have fulfilled this purpose.

Schönland suggests that a stone which had no less than eight grooves was used for rope-making. "It reminded me of a wooden tool which rope-makers use. They let the strands, which they wish. to combine into a rope, run along the grooves, and while it is held steady the turning wheel can only twist the strands between the wheel and this implement.":

*

But what of the stones with only one groove, or of the more or less cylindrical ones in which the grooves are not parallel, but are unevenly spaced, and are sometimes found on one-half only of the convex surface?

The explanation of these grooves needs no such speculative theory, for the reasons I have given. I have examined a very large number of these relics. They have all served as whetstones. for awls or bodkins, or for rounding into shape, or sharpening the bone part of the shaft of arrows; and whereas the sharpening of awls was often done on any rock in situ, the whetting-stone for bone shafts is always of a portable size-at least I know of no other.

BONE TOOLS OTHER THAN KNIVES, AWLS, OR ARROW-SHAFTS.

The bone tools known hitherto seem to be restricted to the purposes, I have explained.

Occasionally, however, we find bone relics of another kind.

Fig. 184 of Pl. XXV. represents the tusk of a hippopotamus, split longitudinally in the centre. It will, however, be seen from the figure that not only one of the ends is rounded, but also that the other has been thinned for prehension by a small hand-a peculiar feature of the Bush people. The hacking necessitated for that reduction has been plainly made by a stone implement, and the weapon, owing to its weight and sharp edge, is not at all a contemptible one. The example was found at great depth in a river bank. Tusks of hippopotamus usually split longitudinally in the manner here shown after long exposure. But we have in the Collection a sub-crescentic one, smaller than Fig. 184, the edges of which have been artificially pared by grinding or polishing in such a manner as to make it a very useful tool for braying skins, an explanation which is, however, speculative.