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NOTES.—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
MISCELLANEOUS.
"Pigmy Flints" in Epping Forest.—At the meeting
on 25th January 1913, Mr. Hazzledine Warren, exhibited
some Pigmy and other Flint implements from a Prehis-
toric site in Epping Forest. He said—Upon this site a very
large number of small and beautifully made flakes, many of
them of pygmy dimensions, had been found, together with
cores, hammer-stones, fabricators, and one or two small fragments
of prehistoric pottery. Associated with these were true pygmy
implements, with trimmed edges, mostly of the long narrow
scalene, or of the 'a dos rebatter' form. In my opinion these
pygmy flints were not to be looked upon as implements complete
in themselves, but a number of them would be used to form the
armature of a single implement. I have recently seen a knife
made by the aborigines of Australia, which illustrates this
principle. This was a wooden stick with a great number of
small splinters of European glazed porcelain, set in gum end to
end, in order to form a jagged cutting edge. Such tools must
seem to us very awkward and inefficient ; still the fact remained
that they were made by modern savages, and that they contrived
to do very good work with them.
It has also been suggested that pygmy implements might have
been set in a piece of wood for the purpose of softening leather.
Indeed, this has actually been tried and found to give excellent
results. Others again may very probably have been barbs,
set in the heads of javelins or harpoons. There are five pre-
historic harpoon-heads from Denmark in the British Museum,
made out of the antler of deer, set along both sides with pygmy
flint barbs. Mr. F. M. Haward believes that the long narrow
scalene pygmy forms were in reality arrow-points, but this
explanation certainly could not apply to all pygmies.—S. Hazzle-
dine Warren, F.G.S., Loughton.
END OF VOLUME XVII.