129. How stone implements are made. What was the process by which these stone implements were made? The artifacts bear witness directly to two or three different operations, separate or combined, and to a great development of the process. As above stated, Tasmanians, after they became known to Europeans, made stone implements as they needed them, giving to a stone a rude adaptation to the purpose by chipping off a few flakes. Short sharp blows were struck by one stone upon another. The blow must, however, fall upon just the right spot or it would not produce the desired result. Therefore the flakes were often thrown off by pressure. A stick or horn was set against the spot where the force should be applied, and braced against the breast of the operator, while he held the stone between his feet. This latter operation is described as used by the Mexicans to get flakes of obsidian.[206] By carrying further the process of chipping or pressing the stone could be shaped more perfectly, and by rubbing it on another stone it could be given a cutting edge. The rubbing process could also be applied to the surface to make it smooth instead of leaving it as it was after the flaking process. The processes of striking and pressing were also combined. The pebble was broken by blows and the pieces were further reduced to shape by the pressing process. Different devices were also invented for holding the stone securely and in the proper position. Skill and judgment in perceiving how and for what purpose each pebble could best be treated was developed by the workers, and division of labor arose amongst them as some acquired greater skill in one operation and others in another. The operations of pressing and striking were also made complex in order to accomplish what was desired. A sapling was cut off so that the stump of a limb was left at the bottom of it. It was set against the spot where the force was needed, and a blow struck in the crotch of the limb caused the chip to fly. This apparatus was improved and refined by putting a horn tip on the end point of contact. Another device was to cut a notch in a tree trunk, which could be used as a fulcrum. A long lever was used to apply the pressure to the stone laid at the root of the tree, or on the horizontal space at the bottom of the notch.[207] These variations show persistent endeavor to get control of the necessary force and to apply it at the proper point with the least chance for error and loss. Buckley reported about the "tomahawks" of the aborigines of Victoria, that the stone was split into pieces, without regard to their shape, but of convenient thickness. A piece was rubbed on rough granite until "it is brought to a very fine thin edge, and so hard and sharp as to enable them to fell a very large tree with it." The handles are "thick pieces of wood, split and then doubled up, the stone being in the bend and fixed with gum, very carefully prepared for the purpose, so as to make it perfectly secure when bound round with sinews."[208] The natives of the Admiralty Islands use obsidian which is dug from layers in the ground. Only a few know the art of making axes, and they prosecute it as a means of livelihood. Skill is required especially to judge of the way in which the stone will split. The only tool is a stone with which light, sharp blows are struck.[209] The axes of the Swiss lake dwellings were made from bowlders of any hard stone. By means of a saw of flint set in wood, with sand and water, a groove was cut on one side and then on the other. With a single blow from another stone the bowlder was made to fall in two. By means of a hard stone the piece was rudely shaped and then finished by friction. A modern student has made such an ax in this way in five hours. Sometimes the stone was set in a handle of wood or horn.[210] It will be noticed that this process was not possible until an auxiliary tool, the flint saw, had already been made. The tools and processes were all rude and great skill and dexterity were required in the operator. "Lafitau says the polishing of a stone ax requires generations to complete. Mr. Joseph D. McGuire fabricates a grooved jade ax from an entirely rough spall in less than a hundred hours."[211]

130. How arrowheads are made. As to arrowheads, "there are a dozen or more authentic reports by eye-witnesses of the manufacture of arrowheads in as many different ways."[212] The California Indians broke up a piece of flint or obsidian to the proper-sized pieces. A piece was held in the left hand, which was protected by a piece of buckskin. Pressure was put upon the edge by a piece of a deer's antler, four to six inches long, held in the right hand. In this way little pieces were chipped off until the arrowhead was formed. Only the most expert do this successfully.[213] Sometimes the stone to be operated on is heated in the fire, and slowly cooled, which causes it to split in flakes. A flake is then shaped with buck-horn pincers, tied together at the point with a thong.[214] In another report it is the stone with which the operation is performed which is said to be heated.[215] In a pit several hundred flint implements were found stored away in regular layers with alternate layers of sand between. Perhaps the purpose was to render them more easy to work to the desired finish.[216] Catlin describes another process of making arrowheads which required two workmen. One held the stone in his left hand and placed a chisel-like instrument at the proper point. The second man struck the blow. Both sang during the operation. The blows were in the rhythm of the music, and a quick "rebounding" stroke was said to be essential to good success.[217] A "lad" in Michigan made arrowheads in imitation of Indian work, from flint, glass, and obsidian, with a piece of oak stick five inches long as a tool.[218] Sophus Müller[219] says of modern attempts to imitate stone-implement making that an average workman can learn in fourteen days to make five hundred to eight hundred arrowheads per day, but that no one of the best workmen has been able to equal the fine chipping on the neolithic stone weapons, although many have made the small implements on the types of the old stone age.

131. How stone axes were used. After stone axes were made it required no little independent sense to use them for the desired result. A modern archæologist used a stone ax of gray flint, with an edge six and a half centimeters long, set in a handle after the prehistoric fashion, to cut sticks of green fir, in order to test the ax. He held the stick upright and chopped into it notchwise until he could break it in two. He cut in two a stick eighteen centimeters in diameter in eighteen minutes. He struck fifteen hundred and seventy-eight cuts. At the fourteen hundred and eighty-fifth cut a piece flew from his ax.[220] A modern investigator made a polished ax in eleven hours and forty-five minutes. He cut down an oak tree 0.73 meter in circumference, with twenty-two hundred blows of the ax, in an hour and thirteen minutes.[221] When primitive men desired to cut down a tree, fire was applied to it and the ax was used only to chop off the charred wood so that the fire would attack the wood again. Canoes were hollowed out of tree trunks by the same process. These processes are reported from different parts of the world remote from each other.[222] Without these auxiliary devices the stone ax can really be used only as a hammer, for, by means of it, the wood is beaten into a fibrous condition and is not properly cut.[223] Nevertheless, the Shingu Indians cleared forests, built houses and canoes, and made furniture with the stone ax alone.[224] The Indians of Guiana, with stone and bone implements, cut down big trees, cut out the core of them, and made weapons and tools of great perfection and beauty.[225] The same may be said of very many other peoples. Some Australians value stone axes so much that they except them from the custom to bury all a man's property with him. Axes are inherited by the next of kin.[226]

132. Acculturation versus parallelism. The facts in regard to making and using stone implements bring up the question whether such arts have a single origin and are spread by contagion (acculturation), or are invented independently by many people who have the same tasks to perform, and the same or similar materials at hand (parallelism). Lippert[227] says that "the different modes of fashioning flint arrowheads show us that we must not think of the earliest art as all tied to a single tradition, and carried away from this. On the contrary, human ingenuity has set about accomplishing the acts which are necessary for the struggle for existence in different places, with the elements there at hand." We have seen above that the materials may, from their character, so limit and condition the operations of manufacture as to set lines for the development of the art. If the processes of the men are also limited and conditioned by the nature of human nerves and muscles so that they must run on certain lines, it would follow that the human mind also, in face of a certain problem, will fall into conditioned modes of activity, and we should approach the doctrine that men must think the same thoughts by way of mental reaction on the same experiences and observations.

The facts, however, show that an art, beginning in the rudest way, is produced along lines of concurrent effort, and is the common property of the group. All practice it as it is, and all are unconsciously coöperating to improve it. The processes are folkways. The artifacts are tools and weapons which, by their utility, modify the folkways and become components in them. The skill, dexterity, patience, ingenuity, and power of combination which result are wider and higher possessions which also modify the folkways at later stages of effort. The generalizations of truth and right widen at every stage, and produce a theory of welfare, which must be recognized as such, no matter how rude it may be. It consists in the application of the notions of goblinism as they are prevalent at the time in the group. The art itself is built up by folkways according to their character as everywhere exhibited, for arts are modes of providing for human necessities by processes and devices which can be universally taught, and can be handed down forever. The arts of an isolated group run against limits, even if the group has great ingenuity, as we see in the case of China. It is when arts are developed by give and take between groups that they reach their highest development. The wider the area over which the coöperation and combination are active, the higher will be the achievements. "Every art is born out of the intelligence of its age."[228] It has been mentioned above that Polynesians cannot use an ax. They want to set the blade transverse to the handle. The negroes of the Niger Protectorate are very clumsy at going up or down stairs. It is a dexterity, not to say an art, which they have had no chance to acquire. They also find it very difficult to understand or interpret a picture, even of the least conventional kind.[229] The Seri of Tiburon Island have not the knife habit. They draw a knife towards the body instead of pushing it away.[230] Hence we see that the lack of a habit, or lack of opportunity to see a dexterity practiced, constitutes a narrowing of the mental horizon.

133. Fire-making tools. Another art which would offer us parallel phenomena to that of stone working is that of fire making. It must have had several independent centers of origin. It existed all over the globe. Its ultimate origin is unknown to us. It may have originated in different ways at different centers. The simplest instruments for making fire can be classified according to the mode of movement employed in them as drilling, plowing, and sawing instruments. The fire drills have also undergone very important development and improvement, so that they have become very complicated machines. The ingenuity and inventive skill which were required to make a fire drill which was driven by a bow were as great as the same powers when manifested by an Edison or a Bessemer.

134. Psychophysical traits of primitive men. All the artifacts were made and all the arts were produced by the concurrent efforts of men to serve their interests. We find that primitive men put patient effort and astonishing ingenuity into their tools. They also attained to great skill in the use of clumsy tools. It is true, in general, of primitive men that they shirk all prolonged effort or patient application, but they do use great patience and perseverance when they expect to accomplish something of great importance to their interests. The same is true if they expect to gratify their vanity. In hair dressing or tattooing they submit to very irksome restraint prolonged through a long time. Also in feather work, partly useful and partly ornamental, they assorted feathers piece by piece, and enlaced the feathers in the meshes of their hats and caps, or fastened them into scepters with pitch. They could make houses, etc., with their axes only by long-continued industry.[231] South American Indians made tools for printing tattoo patterns on the body. They were blocks, on each face of which a pattern was raised, perhaps a different one on each side.[232] It should be noticed what prodigious power a large body of men can put forth when they all work at the same task and are greatly interested in it. They begin by the same process, but the process differentiates and improves in their hands. Each gains skill and dexterity. They learn from each other, and the product is multiplied.

135. Language. Language is a product of the folkways which illustrates their operation in a number of most important details. Language is a product of the need of coöperative understanding in all the work, and in connection with all the interests, of life. It is a societal phenomenon. It was necessary in war, the chase, and industry so soon as these interests were pursued coöperatively. Each group produced its own language which held that group together and sundered it from others.[233] All are now agreed that, whatever may have been the origin of language, it owes its form and development to usage. "Men's usage makes language." "The maxim that 'usage is the rule of speech' is of supreme and uncontrolled validity in every part and parcel of every human tongue."[234] "Language is only the imperfect means of men to find their bearings in the world of their memories; to make use of their memory, that is, their own experience and that of their ancestors, with all probability that this world of memory will be like the world of reality."[235] The origin of language is one of those origins which must ever remain enveloped in mystery. "How can a child understand the combinations of sound and sense when it must know language in order to learn them? It must learn to speak without previously knowing how to speak, without any previous suspicion that the words of its mother mean more than the buzzing of a fly. The child learns to speak from an absolute beginning, just as, not the original man, but the original beast, learned to speak before any creature could speak."[236] The beasts evidently did not learn to speak. They only learned to use the beast cries, by which they transmitted warnings, sex invitations, calls to united struggles, etc. The cries answered the purpose and went no further. Men, by virtue of the expanding power in them which enthused their zeal and their play, broke through the limitations of beast language, and went on to use the sounds of the human speech instrument for ever richer communications. Poetic power in blossom guides the development of a child's language as it guided that of the men who made the first languages.[237] "The original languages must be, in comparison with our languages, like the wildest love-passion compared with marital custom."[238] Every word has a history of accidents which have befallen it, the beginnings of which are lost in the abyss of time.[239] In the Middle Ages the word "Word" came to mean the Word of God with such distinctness that the romance languages adopted parabola, or derivatives from it, for "word."[240] The students of linguistics recognize metaphor as another great mode of modifying the signification of words. By metaphor they mean the assembling of like things, and the selection and extirpation of unlike things.

136. Language and magic. Preuss offers an explanation of the origin of language which is interesting on account of its connection with the vast operation of magic: "Language owes its origin to the magic of tones and words. The difficulty of winning any notion about the beginnings of human speech lies in the fact that we cannot think of any cause which should give occasion for speech utterances. Such occasions are products of education, after language already existed. They are effects of language, not causes of it.... Language belongs, like play, dances, and fine arts, to the things which do not come on a direct line of development out of the instinctive satisfaction of life-needs and the other activities which create things of positive value, but it is the result of belief in magic, which prompted men to imitate noises made in labor, and other natural sounds, through a wide range, in order thereby to produce operations."[241]

137. Language is a case of mores. Whitney said that language is an institution. He meant that it is in the folkways, or in the mores, since welfare is connected with the folkways of language, albeit by some superstition. He adds: "In whatever aspect the general facts of language are viewed, they exhibit the same absence of reflection and intention."[242] "No one ever set himself deliberately at work to invent or improve language,—or did so, at least, with any valuable and abiding result. The work is all accomplished by a continual satisfaction of the needs of the moment, by ever yielding to an impulse and grasping a possibility, which the already acquired treasure of words and forms, and the habit of their use, suggest and put within reach."[243] "Every single item of alteration, of whatever kind, and of whatever degree of importance, goes back to some individual or individuals who set it in circulation, from whose example it gained a wider and wider currency, until it finally won that general assent, which is alone required in order to make anything in language proper and authoritative."[244] These statements might be applied to any of the folkways. The statements on page 46 of Whitney's book would serve to describe and define the mores. This shows to what an extent language is a case of the operation by which mores are produced. They are always devices to meet a need, which are imperceptibly modified and unconsciously handed down through the generations. The ways, like the language, are incorporeal things. They are borne by everybody and nobody, and are developed by everybody and nobody. Everybody has his little peculiarities of language. Each one has his peculiarities of accent or pronunciation and his pet words or phrases. Each one is suggesting all the time the use of the tricks of language which he has adopted. "Nothing less than the combined effort of a whole community, with all its classes and orders, in all its variety of characters, circumstances, and necessities, is capable of keeping in life a whole language."[245] "Every vocable was to us [children] an arbitrary and conventional sign; arbitrary, because any one of a thousand other vocables could have been just as easily learned by us and associated with the same idea; conventional, because the one we acquired had its sole ground and sanction in the consenting use of the community of which we formed a part."[246] "We do not, as children, make our language for ourselves. We get it by tradition, all complete. We think in sentences. As our language forms sentences, that is, as our mother-tongue thinks, so we learn to think. Our brain, our entire thought-status, forms itself by the mother-tongue, and we transmit the same to our children."[247] Nature men have only petty coins of speech. They can express nothing great. They cannot compare, analyze, and combine. They are overwhelmed by a flood of details, in which they cannot discern the ruling idea. The material and sensual constitute their limits. If they move they have to get a new language. The American languages are a soft mass which changes easily if tribes separate, or as time goes on, or if they move their habitat.[248] Sometimes measures are adopted in order to make the language unintelligible, as the Bushmen insert a syllable in a word to that end.[249] "The language of nature peoples offers a faithful picture of their mental status. All is in flux. Nothing is fixed or crystallized. No fundamental thoughts, ideas, or ideals are present. There is no regularity, logic, principles, ethics, or moral character. Lack of logic in thinking, lack of purpose in willing or acting, put the mind of a nature man on a plane with that of our children. Lack of memory, antilogic, paradox, fantasy in mental action, correspond to capriciousness, levity, irresponsibility, and the rule of emotions and passions in practical action."[250] "Man's language developed because he could make, not merely passive and mechanical associative and reproductive combinations of notions, like a beast, but because he had active, free, and productive apperceptions, which appear in creative fantasy and logical reflection."[251] "Man does not speak because he thinks. He speaks because the mouth and larynx communicate with the third frontal convolution of the brain. This material connection is the immediate cause of articulate speech."[252] This is true in the sense that speech is not possible until the vocal organs are present, and are duly connected with the brain. "The specific cry, somewhat modified by the vocal resources of man, may have been sufficient for the humble vocabulary of the earliest ages, and there exists no gulf, no impassable barrier, between the language of birds, dogs, anthropoid apes, and human speech."[253] "The warning or summoning cry, the germ of the demonstrative roots, is the parent of the names of number, sex, and distance; the emotional cry of which our interjections are but the relics, in combination with the demonstratives, prepares the outlines of the sentence, and already represents the verb and the names of states or actions. Imitation, direct or symbolical, and necessarily only approximative to the sounds of external nature, i. e. onomatopœia, furnished the elements of the attributive roots, from which arose the names of objects, special verbs, and their derivatives. Analogy and metaphor complete the vocabulary, applying to the objects, discerned by touch, sight, smell, and taste, qualifying adjectives derived from onomatopœia. Reason, then coming into play, rejects the greater part of this unmanageable wealth, and adopts a certain number of sounds which have already been reduced to a vague and generic sense, and by derivation, combination, and affixes, which are the root sounds, produces those endless families of words, related to each other in every degree of kindred, from the closest to the most doubtful, which grammar finally ranges in the categories known as the parts of speech."[254] "That metaphor makes language grow is evident. It brings about connection between place, time, and sound ideas."[255]