The scraper is made from a narrow thick external flake, the end of which has been trimmed to a semicircular bevelled edge—a |317| portion of one side has also been trimmed. At the end, and along some parts of the sides, this edge is worn quite smooth, and rounded by friction, and there are traces of similar wear at the butt-end. In a second grave in the same barrow there lay, behind the back, two jet buttons and a similar pyrites and flint. There can, I think, be no reasonable doubt of their having been, in these instances, fire-producing implements, used in the manner indicated in the annexed figure. The finding of the two materials together, in two separate instances, in both of which the pyrites and the flint presented the same forms and appearance, establishes the fact of their connection; and it is hard to imagine any other purpose for which pyrites could be scraped by flint except that of producing fire. Moreover, in another barrow on Crosby Garrett Fell,[1428] Westmoreland, Canon Greenwell found a piece of iron ore (oxidized pyrites) held in the hand of a skeleton, and a long thick flake of flint, evidently a “flint and steel.” [Illustration: Fig. 224.—Method of using Pyrites and “Scraper” for Striking a Light.] It cannot have been merely for the purpose of producing a paint or colour that they were brought together, as though the outer crust of a nodule of pyrites might, if ground, give a dull red pigment, yet the inner freshly-broken face would not do so; and, if it would, the colour would be more readily procured by grinding on a flat stone than by scraping. It would be interesting to compare these objects with the pyrites and pebbles in use among the Fuegians[1429], who employ dried moss or fungus by way of tinder, but appear to find some difficulty in producing fire. The Eskimos[1430] and some North American tribes also obtain fire from pyrites. Sir Wollaston Franks has called my attention to another half |318| nodule of pyrites preserved in the British Museum, which is somewhat abraded in the middle of its flat face, though not so much so as that from Yorkshire. It was discovered with flint flakes in a barrow on Lambourn Down,[1431] Berkshire, by Mr. E. Martin Atkins, in 1850. In a barrow at Flowerburn,[1432] Ross-shire, in 1885, a similar half nodule and a flint scraper were found, and a discovery of the same kind was made by Lord Northesk, at Teindside,[1433] near Minto, Roxburghshire, about 1870. A fine piece of pyrites in company with worked flints was found in 1881, in a ruined dolmen, in the Ile d’Arz,[1434] Brittany, by the Abbé Luco. A well striated block of pyrites was also found with numerous objects formed of flint and other kinds of stone, on the Rocher de Beg-er-Goallenner, Quiberon, by M. F. Gaillard.[1435]