At the time of this discovery, that is in 1864, flints were found in thousands imbedded in the vegetable mould on the surface of the soil, over a superficies of 12 to 14 acres. The Abbé Chevalier, giving an account of this curious discovery to the Académie des Sciences at Paris, wrote: "It is impossible to walk a single step without treading on some of these objects."
The workshops of Grand-Pressigny furnish us with a considerable variety of instruments. We find hatchets in all stages of manufacture, from the roughest attempt up to a perfectly polished weapon. We find, also, long flakes or flint-knives cleft off with a single blow with astonishing skill.
All these objects, even the most beautiful among them, are nevertheless defective in some respect or other; hence it may be concluded that they were the refuse thrown aside in the process of manufacture. In this way may be explained the accumulation of so many of these objects in the same spot.
There were likewise narrow and elongated points forming a kind of piercer, perfectly wrought; also scrapers, and saws of a particular type which seem to have been made in a special workshop. They are short and wide, and have at each end a medial slot intended to receive a handle.
Fig. 105.—Nucleus in the Museum of Saint-Germain, from the Workshop of Grand-Pressigny.
But the objects which are the most numerous of all, and those which obviate any doubt that Pressigny was once an important centre of the manufacture of flint, are the nuclei (fig. 105), or the remnants of the lump of flint, from which the large blades known under the name of knives were cleft off. Some of these lumps which we have seen in the Museum of St. Germain were as much as 11 and 13 inches in length; but the greater part did not exceed 7 inches. The labourers of Touraine, who often turn up these flints with their plough-shares, call them pounds of butter, looking at the similarity of shape. At the present day these nuclei are plentiful in all the collections of natural history and geology.
A strange objection has been raised against the antiquity of the hatchets, knives, and weapons found at Pressigny. M. Eugène Robert has asserted that these flints were nothing else but the refuse of the siliceous masses which, at the end of the last century and especially at the beginning of the present, were used in the manufacture of gun-flints!