Silica forms nearly the whole substance of flint; calcite and dolomite may occur in it in small amounts, and analysis has also detected minute quantities of volatile ingredients, organic compounds, &c., to which the dark colour is ascribed by some authorities. These are dispelled by heat and the flint becomes white and duller in lustre. Microscopic sections show that flint is very finely crystalline and consists of quartz or chalcedonic silica; colloidal or amorphous silica may also be present but cannot form any considerable part of the rock. Spicules of sponges and fragments of other organisms, such as molluscs, polyzoa, foraminifera and brachiopods, often occur in flint, and may be partly or wholly silicified with retention of their original structure. Nodules of flint when removed from the chalk which encloses them have a white dull rough surface, and exposure to the weather produces much the same appearance on broken flints. At first they acquire a bright and very smooth surface, but this is subsequently replaced by a dull crust, resembling white or yellowish porcelain. It has been suggested that this change is due to the removal of the colloidal silica in solution, leaving behind the fibres and grains of more crystalline structure. This process must be a very slow one as, from its chemical composition, flint is a material of great durability. Its great hardness also enables it to resist attrition. Hence on beaches and in rivers, such as those of the south-east of England, flint pebbles exist in vast numbers. Their surfaces often show minute crescentic or rounded cracks which are the edges of small conchoidal fractures produced by the impact of one pebble on another during storms or floods.
Flint occurs primarily as concretions, veins and tabular masses in the white chalk of such localities as the south of England (see [Chalk]). It is generally nodular, and forms rounded or highly irregular masses which may be several feet in diameter. Although the flint nodules often lie in bands which closely follow the bedding, they were not deposited simultaneously with the chalk; very often the flint bands cut across the beds of the limestone and may traverse them at right angles. Evidently the flint has accumulated along fissures, such as bedding planes, joints and other cracks, after the chalk had to some extent consolidated. The silica was derived from the tests of radiolaria and the spicular skeletons of sponges. It has passed into solution, filtered through the porous matrix, and has been again precipitated when the conditions were suitable. Its formation is consequently the result of “concretionary action.” Where the flints lie the chalk must have been dissolved away; we have in fact a kind of metasomatic replacement in which a siliceous rock has slowly replaced a calcareous one. The process has been very gradual and the organisms of the original chalk often have their outlines preserved in the flint. Shells may become completely silicified, or may have their cavities occupied by flint with every detail of the interior of the shell preserved in the outer surface of the cast. Objects of this kind are familiar to all collectors of fossils in chalk districts.
Chert is a coarser and less perfectly homogeneous substance of the same nature and composition as flint. It is grey, black or brown, and commonly occurs in limestone (e.g. the Carboniferous Limestone) in the same way as flint occurs in chalk. Some cherts contain tests of radiolaria, and correspond fairly closely to the siliceous radiolarian oozes which are gathering at the present day at the bottom of some of the deepest parts of the oceans. Brownish cherts are found in the English Greensand; these often contain remains of sponges.
The principal uses to which flint has been put are the fabrication of weapons in Palaeolithic and Neolithic times. Other materials have been employed where flint was not available, e.g. obsidian, chert, chalcedony, agate and quartzite, but to prehistoric man (see [Flint Implements] below) flint must have been of great value and served many of the uses to which steel is put at the present day. Flint gravels are widely employed for dressing walks and roads, and for rough-cast work in architecture. For road-mending flint, though very hard, is not regarded with favour, as it is brittle and pulverizes readily; binds badly, yielding a surface which breaks up with heavy traffic and in bad weather; and its fine sharp-edged chips do much damage to tires of motors and cycles. Seasoned flints from the land, having been long exposed to the atmosphere, are preferred to flints freshly dug from the chalk pits. Formerly flint and steel were everywhere employed for striking a light; and gun flints were required for fire-arms. A special industry in the shaping of gun flints long existed at Brandon in Suffolk. In 1870 about thirty men were employed. Since then the trade has become almost extinct as gun flints are in demand only in semi-savage countries where modern fire-arms are not obtainable. Powdered flint was formerly used in the manufacture of glass, and is still one of the ingredients of many of the finer varieties of pottery.
(J. S. F.)
FLINT IMPLEMENTS AND WEAPONS. The excavation of these remains of the prehistoric races of the globe in river-drift gravel-beds has marked a revolution in the study of Man’s history (see [Archaeology]). Until almost the middle of the 19th century no suspicion had arisen in the minds of British and European archaeologists that the momentous results of the excavations then proceeding in Egypt and Assyria would be dwarfed by discoveries at home which revolutionized all previous ideas of Man’s antiquity. It was in 1841 that Boucher de Perthes observed in some sand containing mammalian remains, at Menchecourt near Abbeville, a flint, roughly worked into a cutting implement. This “find” was rapidly followed by others, and Boucher de Perthes published his first work on the subject, Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes: mémoire sur l’industrie primitive et les arts à leur origin (1847), in which he proclaimed his discovery of human weapons in beds unmistakably belonging to the age of the Drift. It was not until 1859 that the French archaeologist convinced the scientific world. An English mission then visited his collection and testified to the great importance of his discoveries. The “finds” at Abbeville were followed by others in many places in England, and in fact in every country where siliceous stones which are capable of being flaked and fashioned into implements are to be found. The implements occurred in beds of rivers and lakes, in the tumuli and ancient burial-mounds; on the sites of settlements of prehistoric man in nearly every land, such as the shell-heaps and lake-dwellings; but especially embedded in the high-level gravels of England and France which have been deposited by river-floods and long left high and dry above the present course of the stream. These gravels represent the Drift or Palaeolithic period when man shared Europe with the mammoth and woolly-haired rhinoceros. The worked flints of this age are, however, unevenly distributed; for while the river-gravels of south-eastern England yield them abundantly, none has been found in Scotland or the northern English counties. On the continent the same partial distribution is observable: while they occur plentifully in the north-western area of France, they are not discovered in Sweden, Norway or Denmark. The association of these flints, fashioned for use by chipping only, with the bones of animals either extinct or no longer indigenous, has justified their reference to the earlier period of the Stone Age, generally called Palaeolithic. Those flint implements, which show signs of polishing and in many cases remarkably fine workmanship, and are found in tumuli, peat-bogs and lake-dwellings mixed with the bones of common domestic animals, are assigned to the Neolithic or later Stone Age. The Palaeolithic flints are hammers, flakes, scrapers, implements worked to a cutting edge at one side, implements which resemble rude axes, flat ovoid implements worked to an edge all round, and a great quantity of spear and arrow heads. None of these is ground or polished. The Neolithic flints, on the other hand, exhibit more variety of design, are carefully finished, and the particular use of each weapon can be easily detected. Man has reached the stage of culture when he could socket a stone into a wooden handle, and fix a flaked flint as a handled dagger or knife. The workmanship is superior to that shown in any of the stone utensils made by savage tribes of historic times. The manner of making flint implements appears to have been in all ages much the same. Flint from its mode of fracture is the only kind of stone which can be chipped or flaked into almost any shape, and thus forms the principal material of these earliest weapons. The blows must be carefully aimed or the flakes dislodged will be shattered: a gun-flint maker at Brandon, Suffolk, stated that it took him two years to acquire the art.
For accounts of the gun-flint manufacture at Brandon, and detailed descriptions of ancient flint-working, see Sir John Evans, Ancient Stone Implements (1897), Lord Avebury’s Prehistoric Times (1865, 1900); also Thomas Wilson, “Arrow-heads, Spear-heads and Knives of Prehistoric Times,” in Smithsonian Report for 1897; and W.K. Moorehead, Prehistoric Implements (1900).
FLOAT (in O. Eng. flot and flota, in the verbal form fléotan; the Teutonic root is flut-, another form of flu-, seen in “flow,” cf. “fleet”; the root is seen in Gr. πλέειν, to sail, Lat. pluere, to rain; the Lat. fluere and fluctus, wave, is not connected), the action of moving on the surface of water, or through the air. The word is used also of a wave, or the flood of the tide, river, backwater or stream, and of any object floating in water, as a mass of ice or weeds; a movable landing-stage, a flat-bottomed boat, or a raft, or, in fishing, of the cork or quill used to support a baited line or fishing-net. It is also applied to the hollow or inflated organ by means of which certain animals, such as the “Portuguese man-of-war,” swim, to a hollow metal ball or piece of whinstone, &c., used to regulate the level of water in a tank or boiler, and to a piece of ivory in the cistern of a barometer. “Float” is also the name of one of the boards of a paddle-wheel or water-wheel. In a theatrical sense, it is used to denote the footlights. The word is also applied to something broad, level and shallow, as a wooden frame attached to a cart or wagon for the purpose of increasing the carrying capacity; and to a special kind of low, broad cart for carrying heavy weights, and to a platform on wheels used for shows in a procession. The term is applied also to various tools, especially to many kinds of trowels used in plastering. It is also used of a dock where vessels may float, as at Bristol, and of the trenches used in “floating” land. In geology and mining, loose rock or ore brought down by water is known as “float,” and in tin-mining it is applied to a large trough used for the smelted tin. In weaving the word is used of the passing of weft threads over part of the warp without being woven in with it, also of the threads so passed. In the United States a voter not attached to any particular party and open to bribery is called a “float” or “floater.”