I have found scores of such knives in the fields that extend along the little valley, and a few came to light in my search that afternoon in the brook-side sands and gravel. So, if this chipped flint is a knife, then, as in modern times, the children were whittlers.
fish-hooks.
Of course, our boys nowadays would be puzzled to cut a willow whistle or mend the baby’s go-cart with such a knife as this; but still, it will not do to despise stone cutlery. Remember the big canoe at the Centennial, that took up so much room in the Government building. That boat, sixty feet long, was made in quite recent times, and only stone knives and hatchets were used in the process.
I found, too, in that afternoon walk, some curiously shaped splinters of jasper, which at first did not seem very well adapted to any purpose; and yet, although mere fragments, they had every appearance of having been purposely shaped, and not of accidental resemblances to a hook or sickle blade. When I got home, I read that perfect specimens, mine being certainly pieces of the same form, had been found away off in Norway; and Professor Nilsson, who has carefully studied the whole subject, says they are fish-hooks.
Instead of my broken ones, we have in the fourth illustration some uninjured specimens of these fish-hooks from Norway. Two are made of flint, the largest one being bone; and hooks of exactly the same patterns really have been found within half a mile of the little valley I worked in that afternoon.
The fish-hooks shown in our picture have been thought to be best adapted for, and really used in, capturing cod-fish in salt water, and perch and pike in inland lakes. The broken hooks I found were fully as large; and so the little brook that now ripples down the valley, when a large stream, must have had a good many big fishes in it, or the stone-age fishermen would not have brought their fishing-hooks, and have lost them, along this remnant of a larger stream.
But it must not be supposed that only children in this by-gone era, did the fishing for their tribe. Just as the men captured the larger game, so they took the bigger fishes; but it is scarcely probable that the boys who waded the little brooks with bows and arrows would remain content with that, and, long before they were men, doubtless they were adepts in catching the more valuable fishes that abounded, in Indian times, in all our rivers.
So, fishing, I think, was another way in which the stone-age children played.