The flint-workers who, up to the middle of the present century, prepared gun-flints for the army, were in the habit of splitting the stone into splinters. But they made use of steel hammers to cleave the flint, whilst primitive man had nothing better at his disposal than another and rather harder stone. Primitive man must have gone to work in somewhat the following way: They first selected flints, which they brought to the shape of those cores or _nuclei_ which are found in many places in company with finished implements; then, by means of another and harder stone of elongated shape, they cleft flakes off the flint. These flakes were used for making knives, scratchers, spear or arrow-heads, hatchets, tomahawks, scrapers, &c. Some amount of skill must have been required to obtain the particular shape that was required; but constant practice in this work exclusively must have rendered this task comparatively easy. [Illustration: Fig. 15.--Flint Core or Nucleus.] How, in the next place, were these clipped flints fitted with handles, so as to make hatchets, poniards and knives? Some of them were fixed at right angles between the two split ends of a stick: this kind of weapon must have somewhat resembled our present hatchets. Others, of an oval shape and circular edge, might have been fastened transversely into a handle, so as to imitate a carpenter's adze. In case of need, merely a forked branch or a piece of split wood might serve as sheath or handle to the flint blade. Flints might also have been fixed as double-edged blades by means of holes cut in pieces of wood, to which a handle was afterwards added. These flint flakes might, lastly, be fitted into a handle at one end. The wide-backed knives, which were only sharp on one side, afforded a grasp for the hand without further trouble, and might dispense with a handle. The small flints might also be darted as projectiles by the help of a branch of a tree forming a kind of spring, such as we may see used as a toy by children. The mere description of these stone hatchets, fitted on to pieces of wood, recall to our mind the natural weapons used by some of the American savages, and the tribes which still exist in a state of freedom in the Isles of Oceania. We allude to the tomahawk, a name which we so often meet with in the accounts of voyages round the world. Among those savage nations who have not as yet bent their necks beneath the yoke of civilisation, we might expect to find--and, in fact, we do find--the weapons and utensils which were peculiar to man in primitive ages. A knowledge of the manners and customs of the present Australian aborigines has much conduced to the success of the endeavours to reconstruct a similar system of manners and customs in respect to man of the quaternary age.