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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
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