United States or Guernsey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But even the antiquaries are agreed that, long before the coming of the Romans, many earlier races successively made on this mountain promontory overlooking the Rhône delta their fortified home: for here, as on scores of other defensible heights throughout Provence, the merest scratching of the soil brings to light flints and potshards which tell of varied human occupancy in very far back times.
The water of our atmosphere is fresh though it is derived from the salt sea. Sugar dissolved in water, and permitted to evaporate, yields crystals of sugar-candy. Alum readily crystallizes in the same way. Flints dissolved, as they sometimes are in nature, and permitted to crystallize, yield the prisms and pyramids of rock crystal. Chalk dissolved and crystallized yields Iceland spar.
When Major Powell landed there on his first trip down the Colorado River in 1869, he found broken pottery, an old "matate" and many chipped flints, indicating that this had been the home of an arrowmaker. The mealing stone, or matate, can be seen at Phantom Ranch, half a mile on along the trail.
But we might also call it young if it conducted all its industry with chipped flints; meaning that it was primitive. These two meanings of youth are hopelessly mixed up when the word is applied to America. But what is more curious, the two elements really are wildly entangled in America.
Then, when you are all to bits, you can be built up. Do you remember that stone we broke the other day? Well, I was a melted blob of stone, and then I was crystallised now I'm full of eyes within! And the best of it is that they are little living eyes, and not sparkling flints they see, they don't reflect!
"Yes, senor, I have five boxes, and half a dozen more flints." They carried the keg of powder, the sledges, drills, and wedges downstairs, and then Dias and Jose set to work to sweep out the two chambers. The work was easy, but they were obliged to stop several times, being almost choked with the light dust.
A stonebreaker was at work on an adjacent pile of flints, and when I alighted to examine the wreck, he nailed me with, 'Hoy, mister! Ye'd better leave thick thur car alone. The p'lice be comin' to tek un up zhortly. "I gathered from him that he had been told to keep an eye upon the car, but beyond having heard that the owners had met with an accident, he knew nothing.
In the Crimea were picked up a number of small flints cut into the shape of a crescent exactly like those found in the Indies and in Tunis, and the Anthropological Society of Moscow has introduced us to a Stone age the memory of which is preserved in the tumuli of Russia.
At the present day, the Albanian Palikares use pointed flints to cut the flesh off the shoulder-blade of a sheep with a view to seeking in its fibres the secrets of the future, and when the god Gimawong visits his temple of Labode, on the western coast of Africa, his worshippers offer him a bull slain with a stone knife.
Some wiped out and carefully loaded their guns, others examined the priming of their pieces, and chipped the edges off the flints to make sure of their not missing fire. All looked to the girths of their saddles, and a few threw off their coats and rolled their shirt-sleeves up to their shoulders, as if they were going to undertake hard and bloody work.
Word Of The Day