quartzite, felstone, serpentine, and various kinds of greenstone, and of metamorphic rocks. M. A. Damour,[1] in his "Essays on the Composition of Stone Hatchets, Ancient and Modern," gives the following list of materials: quartz, agate, flint, jasper, obsidian, fibrolite, jade, jadeite, chloromelanite, amphibolite, aphanite, diorite, saussurite, and staurotide; but even to these many other varieties of rock might be added.
The material most commonly in use in the southern and eastern parts of Britain was flint derived from the chalk; in the north and west, on the contrary, owing to the scarcity of flint, different hard metamorphic and eruptive rocks were more frequently employed, not on account of any superior qualities, but simply from being more accessible. So far as general character is concerned, stone celts or hatchets may be divided into three classes, which I propose to treat separately, as follows:—
1. Those merely chipped out in a more or less careful manner, and not ground or polished;
2. Those which, after being fashioned by chipping, have been ground or polished at the edge only; and
3. Those which are more or less ground or polished, not only at the edge, but over the whole surface.
In describing them I propose to term the end opposite to the cutting edge, the butt-end; the two principal surfaces, which are usually convex, I shall speak of as the faces. These are either bounded by, or merge in, what I shall call the sides, according as these sides are sharp, rounded, or flat. In the figures the celts are all engraved on the scale of half an inch to the inch, or half linear measure, and are presented in front and side-view, with a section beneath.
- ↑ Comptes Rendus de l' Ac. des Sci., 1865, vol. lxi. pp. 313, 357; 1866, lxiii. p. 1038.
