their turn, took up the question, and Mahudel, one of its members,
in presenting several stones, showed that they bad evidently been
cut by the hand of man. "An examination of them," he said, "affords
a proof of the efforts of our earliest ancestors to provide for their
wants, and to obtain the necessaries of life." He added that after the
re-peopling of the earth after the deluge, men were ignorant of the use
of metals. Mahudel's essay is illustrated by drawings, some of which
we reproduce (Fig. 1), showing wedges, hammers, hatchets, and flint
arrow-beads taken, he tells us, from various private collections.[6]

Bishop Lyttelton, writing in 1736, speaks of such weapons as having
been made at a remote date by savages ignorant of the use of metals,[7]
and Sir W. Dugdale, an eminent antiquary of the seventeenth century,
attributed to the ancient Britons some flint hatchets found in
Warwickshire, and thinks they were made when these weapons alone
were used.[8]


FIGURE 1

Stone weapons described by Mahudel in 1734.


A communication made by Frere to the Royal Society of London deserves
mention here with a few supplementary remarks.[9]

This distinguished man of science found at Hoxne, in Suffolk, about
twelve feet below the surface of the soil, worked flints, which had
evidently been the natural weapons of a people who had no knowledge
of metals. With these flints were found some strange bones with the