There are also instances of its occurrence in British barrows. That careful observer, the late Mr. Thomas Bateman, found, in the year 1844, in a barrow on Elton Moor,[1417] near the head of a skeleton, “a piece of spherical iron pyrites, now for the first time noticed as being occasionally found with other relics in the British tumuli. Subsequent discoveries,” he says, “have proved that it was prized by the Britons, and not unfrequently deposited in the grave, along with the weapons and ornaments which formed the most valued part of their store.” With the same skeleton, in a “drinking-cup,” with a small celt and other objects of flint, was a flat piece of polished iron ore, and twenty-one “circular instruments.” In another barrow, Green Low,[1418] Mr. Bateman discovered a contracted skeleton, having behind the shoulders a drinking-cup, a splendid flint dagger, a piece of spherical pyrites or iron ore, and a flint instrument of the circular-headed form. Lower down were barbed flint arrow-heads and some bone instruments. In Dowe Low,[1419] a skeleton was accompanied by a bronze dagger and an “amulet or ornament of iron ore,” together with a large flint implement that had seen a good deal of service. A broken nodule of pyrites showing signs of friction was found with a bronze dagger in a |314| barrow at Angrowse[1420] Mullion, Cornwall. In a barrow at Brigmilston,[1421] between Everley and Amesbury, Sir R. Colt Hoare found, with an urn containing ashes, “the fragment of a bone article like a whetstone, some chipped flints prepared for arrow-heads, a long piece of flint and a _pyrites_, both evidently smoothed by usage.” A piece of iron pyrites with a groove worn in it and a peculiarly shaped implement of flint with evident marks of use at the larger end were found with an interment near Basingstoke Station.[1422] Flint arrow-heads and flakes were also present. Nodules of pyrites occurred in such numbers in a barrow on Broad Down,[1423] near Honiton, as to suggest the idea of their having been placed there designedly, but none of them are described as abraded. We have here, at all events, instances of the association of lumps of iron pyrites with circular-ended flint instruments in ancient interments. Can they have been in use together for producing fire? In order to judge of this our best guide will probably be, so far at all events as the flints are concerned, those in use for the same purpose in later times, and even at the present day. In the Abbé Hamard’s researches at Hermes[1424] (Oise), two flint scrapers mounted in wooden handles round which were iron ferrules are said to have been discovered in Merovingian graves. [Illustration: Fig. 222.—French “Strike-a-Light.”]