form was found in a cairn at Penbeacon,[1] Dartmoor, and was regarded by Mr. Spence Bate as a tool used in fashioning clay vessels. Dr. Thurnam[2] has suggested that if covered with leather these stones may have served as bracers or arm-guards for archers.
Two pieces of a dark-coloured slaty kind of stone, of nearly the same form and size as the Yorkshire specimen, and lying parallel with each other, were found by Sir R. Colt Hoare[3] at the feet of a skeleton, together with a little rude drinking-cup, in a barrow near Winterbourn Stoke. A stud and ring of jet, probably of the same character as those from Rudstone, and a piece of flint rudely chipped, as if intended for a dagger or spear, were also found. No bronze objects were discovered, but the cist appears to have been imperfectly examined.
Fig. 183.—Fimber. 12
I have already mentioned[4] that in grinding and polishing the concave faces of different forms of perforated stone axes, it is probable that stone rubbers were used in conjunction with sand. Even the smaller flat and rounded faces may have been wrought by similar means. That rubbers of some kind must have been used, is, I think, evident from the character of the surfaces, especially of those which are hollowed; and the most readily available material for the formation of such rubbers, was doubtless stone. There is therefore an à priori probability of such stone grinding-tools having been in use; and if we find specimens which present the conditions which such tools would exhibit, we are almost justified in assuming them to have served such purposes. Now in the collection of Messrs. Mortimer, of Driffield, Yorkshire, are several pieces of flint and portions of pebbles of schist, flint, and quartz found in that neighbourhood, which are ground at one end into a more or less rounded form, and exhibit striæ running along, and not across, the rounded surface. They have, in fact, all the appearance of having been used with coarse sand for grinding a concavity in another stone, such, for instance, as the concave face of the stone axe shown in Fig. 125. I am indebted to their kindness for the specimen shown in Fig. 183, which consists of a short piece of a conical nodule of flint, the large end of which has been used for grinding in ancient times, the striated face being now considerably weathered. In the Greenwell Collection is a rubber of the same kind from Weaverthorpe on the Yorkshire Wolds. Mr. H. S. Harland[5] has found other specimens in Yorkshire, of which he has kindly given me several. Polishers[6] are also found in Scotland. A polisher of somewhat similar character, but made of serpentine, was found in the
