A stone implement,[632] “a square chisel at one end and a gouge at the other,” was found in one of the Gibraltar caves. In North America,[633] including Canada and Newfoundland, gouges formed of other varieties of stone than flint are by no means uncommon, and among the Caribs of Barbados, where stone was not to be procured, we find gouge-like instruments formed from the _columella_ of the large _Strombus gigas_. On the western coast of North America, mussel-shell adzes are still preferred by the Ahts[634] to the best English chisels, for canoe-making purposes. Some narrow bastard gouges, almost semicircular on one face and flat transversely on the other, but not hollowed, have been found in the Swiss Lake-settlements. I have one of diorite, 5 3∕4 inches long and 1 inch broad, from Sipplingen. The butt is roughened as if for insertion in a socket. A similar form is found in Germany. I have a specimen 9 1∕2 inches long found in the neighbourhood of Mainz. A bastard form of gouge, mounted as an adze, is in use in the Solomon Islands. One tied to its haft with rattan is in the Christy Collection. |183| CHAPTER VIII. PERFORATED AXES. I now come to a very important class of antiquities, the stone axes and axe-hammers with a hole for the insertion of a shaft, like the ordinary axes and hammers of the present day. As to the method by which these shaft-holes were bored, I have already spoken in a previous chapter. I have also mentioned that many of them appear to belong to a time when bronze was already in use, at all events for knife-like daggers, and that they have in many countries shared with the more simply-formed celts the attribution of a heavenly origin as thunderbolts, together with the superstitious reverence due to their supernatural descent. I have, therefore, but little here to add beyond a classification and description of the various forms; but I may mention that the name by which such implements were “popularly known in Scotland almost till the close of last century was that of the Purgatory Hammer,” buried with its owner that he might have the wherewithal “to thunder at the gates of Purgatory till the heavenly janitor appeared.”[635]