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An obvious advance would be to furnish the cutting part with the incisors of animals and stone-splinters. In Europe these would be agate, chalcedony, and rock-crystal; quartz and quartzite; flint, chert, Lydian stone, horn-stone, basalt, lava, and greenstone (or diorite); hæmatite, chlorite, gabbro (a tough bluish-green stone), true jade (nephrite), jadite, and fibrolite, found in Auvergne. Pinna and other shells have been extensively used—for instance, by the Andamanese—as arrow-heads and adze-blades.[139]

Fig. 60.—Australian Spears armed with Flints at Side.

Fig. 61.—Sword of Sabre Form, with Sharks’ Teeth

(South Pacific).

From the Meyrick Collection, now in the British Museum.

Fig. 62.—Armed with Obsidian

(Mexico).

Tenerife, and the so-called New World, preferred the easily-cleft green-black obsidian,[140] of which the Ynkas also made their knives. The Polynesian Islands show two distinct systems of attachment. In the first the fragments, inserted into the grooved side, are either tied or made fast by gum or cement. In the second they are set in a row between two small slats or strips of wood, which, lastly, are lashed to the weapon with fibres. The points are ingeniously arranged in the opposite direction, so as to give severe cuts both in drawing and withdrawing. The Eskimos secure the teeth by pegs of wood and bone. The Pacho of the South Sea Islanders is a club studded on the inner side with shark’s teeth made fast in the same manner. The Brazilian Tapuyas armed a broad-headed club with teeth and bones sharpened at the point.[141] In ‘Flint Chips’ we find that a North American tribe used for thrusting a wooden Sword, three feet long, tipped with mussel-shell. Throughout Australia the natives provide their spears with sharp pieces of obsidian or crystal: of late years they have applied common glass,[142] a new use for waste and broken bottles (fig. 70). The fragments are arranged in a row along one side near the point, and are firmly cemented. There is no evidence of this flint-setting in Ireland: but the frequent recurrence of silex implements adapted for such purpose has suggested, as in the Iroquois graves, that the wood which held them together may have perished. We read in ‘Flint Chips’ that the Selden Manuscript shows a flake of obsidian mounted in a cleft wooden handle, the latter serving as a central support, with a mid-rib running nearly the whole length. The sole use of the weapon was for thrusting.[143]