it not being hence deducible, but they may be British, they are not ill-placed here, whatever original they have had from either nation."
Plot gives engravings both of a stemmed and barbed arrow-head, and of a leaf-shaped lance-head or knife.
Sir Robert Sibbald, in his[1] "Scotia Illustrata," 1684, expresses his belief that the flint arrow-heads are artificial. He possessed two, one like the head of a lance and the other like the end of an anchor, or tanged and barbed. He also relates the account given him by the Laird of Straloch, in Aberdeenshire, which he had passed on to the historian of Staffordshire.
It will be observed that Plot alludes to different opinions regarding these instruments, it being a matter in dispute whether they were artificial, natural, or partly natural; in the same manner as at the time when the flint implements were first discovered in the River Gravels doubts were expressed by some as to their artificial origin, while others regarded them as fossils of natural formation; and others again carried their unconscious Manichæism so far as to ascribe all fossils, and we may presume these included, to diabolical agency. The old Danish collector, Olaf Worm, speaks of a flint of a dark colour[2] exhibiting the form of a spear-head with such accuracy that it may be doubted whether it is a work of art or of nature, and of others like daggers, which, as being found in ancient grave-hills, are regarded by some as the arms of an early people; while others doubt whether they are the work of art or nature; and others consider them to be thunderbolts. One reason in former times for doubting the artificial origin of the most highly finished instruments was ignorance of how such objects could have been chipped out. After describing one of the beautiful Danish daggers, with the delicately "ripple-marked" blade and the square ornamented handle, Worm remarks—"si silex ullo modo arte foret tractabilis, potius Arte quam Naturâ elaboratum esse hoc corpus jurares."[3]
Aldrovandus[4] engraves a flint arrow-head as a Glossopetra—a stone which, according to Pliny,[5] "resembleth a man's tongue, and groweth not upon the ground, but in the eclipse of the moone falleth from heaven," and which "is thought by the magicians to be verie necessarie for those that court faire women."
But perhaps one of the most curious of these early notices of flint
