It is a splinter of flint made by primitive man, and he used it to bore holes in wood or as an awl for piercing skins. It came from Boone County, Missouri. It is immensely old, so old that its date, or when it was made, can only be guessed. The antiquity of it in a general way can be insisted upon, because it is what is called "weathered," and by weathered this is meant: that the piece of flint has been so long exposed to the action of the air and moisture that the composition of the flint has altered. If you were to take a piece of freshly splintered flint and put it in a hole in the ground when you were ten years old, and waited until you were seventy, and then dug it up, the alteration on the outside would be but slight. You might, of course, put it in wet ground where the water was full of lime in solution, and more rapid changes would take place. Anyhow, you would not be likely in a lifetime to see much alteration in the character of your flint. If your great-great-great-grandfather had buried that flint, and you had found it, the changes would have been more evident. Now this gimlet, or borer, is of a white creamy color, and you cannot see that it resembles flint. I could not bore a hole with it, because it would be certain to break.
If I were to guess how old it is I should say, "Fifteen hundred years ago that borer was in use," and then I might not give it age enough. It is a very old-fashioned gimlet, and since we can make gimlets to-day for less than a cent apiece, I wonder what this flint one was worth fifteen or twenty thousand years ago?
You might never have thought about it, but the hardest thing to do to-day is to find out exactly what a thing costs. There are, however, certain things that you do know—the cost of the raw material, and the price of labor. When the gimlet-maker in New England made up the price of his wares by the millions, he had to count up a hundred or more different kinds of expenses before he could settle down to what was about the exact cost of a gimlet.
We cannot apply the same rules exactly to this flint tool. In 1896 you can buy iron or steel everywhere. Flint may seem to you to-day as of no great value, because there is so little demand for it, but in the early history of man it was a substance highly prized. It is not scattered about everywhere. Primitive man made long journeys in order to obtain it. He wanted it badly, not only for his tools, but for the purpose of making a fire. He knew that by striking it with a bit of metal or with certain natural metallic substances he could bring forth sparks. There are often found in the graves of men whose race or tribe or origin is lost bits of flint with fragments of pyrites; and pyrites is a natural combination of sulphur and iron. When you strike them together there is a spark. What is strange about these finds is this, that in the surrounding country there is not to be found a bit of flint or a scrap of pyrites. Primitive man must have set out to find them, or they came to him by barter. I should then think that if we could measure the values of tools in the past with those of to-day, such implements as early man had were expensive, and worth comparatively more to him than our tools are to us. It is, however, a puzzle. Labor must have been cheap, because savage people take little account of time. To-day we know how these flint tools or weapons are made, and coarser ones can be fashioned by us in a short time. There must have been developed, however, great skill in the long past, and for this simple reason: The flint tools broke so easily that there was always a demand for new tools, and so the old gimlet business must have been always brisk.
A PREHISTORIC SCRAPER.
Another illustration is a scraper, and belongs also to the United States National Museum. It served for dressing skins, in removing the hair and grease, before the rough process of tanning. These stone scrapers are found of all sizes, and as implements might have served for a variety of purposes. This bit of flint is as old as the gimlet or borer, being white with age.
THE CHISEL.