All these objects, even the most beautiful among them, are nevertheless defective in some respect or other; hence it may be concluded that they were the refuse thrown aside in the process of manufacture. In this way may be explained the accumulation of so many of these objects in the same spot. There were likewise narrow and elongated points forming a kind of piercer, perfectly wrought; also scrapers, and saws of a particular type which seem to have been made in a special workshop. They are short and wide, and have at each end a medial slot intended to receive a handle. [Illustration: Fig. 105.--Nucleus in the Museum of Saint-Germain, from the Workshop of Grand-Pressigny.] But the objects which are the most numerous of all, and those which obviate any doubt that Pressigny was once an important centre of the manufacture of flint, are the _nuclei_ (fig. 105), or the remnants of the lump of flint, from which the large blades known under the name of knives were cleft off. Some of these lumps which we have seen in the Museum of St. Germain were as much as 11 and 13 inches in length; but the greater part did not exceed 7 inches. The labourers of Touraine, who often turn up these flints with their plough-shares, call them _pounds of butter_, looking at the similarity of shape. At the present day these _nuclei_ are plentiful in all the collections of natural history and geology. A strange objection has been raised against the antiquity of the hatchets, knives, and weapons found at Pressigny. M. Eugène Robert has asserted that these flints were nothing else but the refuse of the siliceous masses which, at the end of the last century and especially at the beginning of the present, were used in the manufacture of gun-flints! The Abbé Bourgeois, M. Penguilly l'Haridon, and Mr. John Evans did not find much difficulty in proving the slight foundation there was for this criticism. In the department of Loire-et-Cher, in which the gun-flint manufacture still exists, the residue from the process bears no resemblance whatever to the _nuclei_ of Pressigny; the fragments are much less in bulk, and do not present the same constantly-occurring and regular shapes. Added to this, they are never chipped at the edges, like a great number of the flakes coming from the workshops of Touraine.