Primitive manufacture was not confined to the shaping of wood. The shaping of stone followed in due time. If a tree branch could be made more suitable for its purpose by cutting it into shape with a rude stone axe or hatchet, a stone of better shape might be obtained by hammering. Doubtless the chipping effect of striking stone upon stone had been often observed before the idea arose that this could be made useful, and that where stones of the desired shape were not to be found, the shape of those at hand might in this way be improved. If we seek for some turning-point, some stage of progress, in which the man-ape fairly emerged into man, perhaps it would be well to select that which we have now reached, that in which the animal in question, which had hitherto used the objects of nature in their natural form, first gained the idea of manufacture and began to shape these objects by the use of tools. In truth, the dividing line between man-ape and man was imperceptibly fine. Various points of demarcation might be chosen, each founded on some important step in evolution. But among them all that in which the effort to convert the objects of nature into better weapons by the use of tools is perhaps the best, as it was probably the first step in that long process of manufacture to which man owes his wonderful advance. With this early effort at manufacture, man had reached a stage in which he was first able to make a permanent record of his existence upon the earth--aside from that of the very infrequent preservation of his bones as fossil remains. A chipped stone is a permanent object. Even a very rudely shaped one bears some indications of its origin upon its surface, some marks pointing back to man in his early days. Unfortunately for anthropologists, natural agencies sometimes produce effects resembling those achieved by man's hands, and some degree of skill in manufacture and well-marked design is necessary before one can be sure that a seeming stone weapon has not been shaped by nature instead of man. Within a recent period research for the evidence of early man in the shape of chipped stones has been diligently made, with an abundance of undoubted and a number of doubtful results. Some of these reach very far back in time, and if actually the work of man he must have lived upon the earth as a manufacturing animal for years that may be numbered by the million. Seemingly chipped stones have been found that belong to the remote Miocene geological age. With the latter are some scratches upon bones that also seem the work of tools. But these Miocene relics are questionable. They do not seem to surpass the shaping power of nature herself. Unless some more indubitable relics are found, we must place the advent of man as a tool-using animal at a much later date. How far back he may have existed as a man-like biped is another question, which we are not likely soon to solve.