ion of Indian work, from flint, glass, and obsidian,
with a piece of oak stick five inches long as a tool.[218] Sophus
Mueller[219] says of modern attempts to imitate stone-implement making
that an average workman can learn in fourteen days to make five hundred
to eight hundred arrowheads per day, but that no one of the best workmen
has been able to equal the fine chipping on the neolithic stone weapons,
although many have made the small implements on the types of the old
stone age.

+131. How stone axes were used.+ After stone axes were made it required
no little independent sense to use them for the desired result. A modern
archaeologist used a stone ax of gray flint, with an edge six and a half
centimeters long, set in a handle after the prehistoric fashion, to cut
sticks of green fir, in order to test the ax. He held the stick upright
and chopped into it notchwise until he could break it in two. He cut in
two a stick eighteen centimeters in diameter in eighteen minutes. He
struck fifteen hundred and seventy-eight cuts. At the fourteen hundred
and eighty-fifth cut a piece flew from his ax.[220] A modern
investigator made a polished ax in eleven hours and forty-five minutes.
He cut down an oak tree 0.73 meter in circumference, with twenty-two
hundred blows of the ax, in an hour and thirteen minutes.[221] When
primitive men desired to cut down a tree, fire was applied to it and the
ax was used only to chop off the charred wood so that the fire would
attack the wood again. Canoes were hollowed out of tree trunks by the
same process. These processes are reported from different parts of the
world remote from each other.[222] Without these auxiliary devices the
stone ax can really be used only as a hammer, for, by means of it, the
wood is beaten into a fibrous condition and is not properly cut.[223]
Nevertheless, the Shingu Indians cleared forests, built houses and
canoes, and made furniture with the stone ax alone.[224] The Indians of
Guiana, with stone and bone implements, cut down big trees, cut out the
core of them, and made weapons and tools of great perfection and
beauty.[225] The same may be said of very many other peoples. Some
Australians value stone axes so much that they except them from the
custom to bury all a man's property with him. Axes are inherited by the
next of kin.[226]

+132. Acculturation versus parallelism.+ The facts in regard to making
and using stone implements bring up the question whether such