The sugar quartz of Wisconsin, and the pink quartz of Arkansas are almost agates. The range in texture of the stone and color of all these implements is considerable. Although mineralogists name many of them as of one kind of stone, yet these implements can be distinguished, because of peculiar color or markings or texture, by the naked eye. There is nothing visionary about such differentiation. It is real and apparent. The people of a given village-site, or of a given territory, obtained their material from a certain ledge or quarry or river drift, and neighboring tribes, two or three hundred miles away, went elsewhere for their material. I have referred on previous pages to the long flint objects from the Middle South. Readers will do well to compare them with the best flint abroad or elsewhere. It was necessary for the master workman who made these objects to secure unusually long, clear blocks of flint, in which were no imperfections. Where the material was obtained for these specimens (some of which are twenty to twenty-two inches in length) is a mystery. It was a simple task for the ancient workman to block out the implement, leaving it spade-like in character, fairly thick, and exhibiting a surface from which flakes an inch or more in size had been chipped. The next step required, one may imagine, the combined efforts of two or three skillful workmen. Possibly they made use of simple levers and heavy bone tools, as Sellars has stated, in order to detach the flakes. Pressure wrongly directed would result in breaking the implement. The final chipping must have been the work of one man, and doubtless it was performed by means of a single bone flaking-tool. We can imagine with what care the master workman proceeded. How many of these long thin blades he broke no man may know. [Illustration: FIG. 216. (S. 1–3.) Mr. H. M. Braun’s collection, East St. Louis, Illinois. This is a highly developed chipped object, with an exceedingly keen cutting edge. It would appear to be a special ceremonial axe. It belongs to the class of unknown objects of remarkable form and workmanship. ] Formerly, it was thought that native Americans could not have produced, in flint, the equal of the slender flint daggers found in Scandinavia. We now know—and have the specimens to prove it—that prehistoric man in America was at least the equal, and possibly the superior, in point of skill of Neolithic man in Europe. Regarding the value that Indians attached to large flint or obsidian objects, Mr. H. N. Rust of California, for many years interested in archæology, presents a paper in the _American Anthropologist_, vol. VII, no. 4, p. 688, which sheds some light on the matter. I quote a few paragraphs:—