Note 6 — Chapter VI · Industry, Commerce, and Social Organization; Fights, Wounds and Trepanation.

M. Boule,6 from whom we borrow these details, cannot restrain his astonishment at the practical knowledge shown by these prehistoric miners. He tells us that they sometimes left the flint standing as pillars at pretty short intervals, or they propped up the galleries with even more resistant material, cementing them with clay or with calcareous earth taken from the detritus. In spite of these precautions, landslips frequently occurred, and implements of stag-horn (Fig. 75) have often been flattened by the fall of the roof of the gallery. It is really curious to find implements of an exactly similar kind used for exactly similar purposes at Spiennes, Brandon, Mur de Barrez, and at Cissbury, to which, however, we shall have to refer again. In the shafts of Aveyron, as in those of England, the marks of blows of the picks are still to be seen, and in many cases a flint or horn-pick point is still imbedded in the rock or limestone, as if the miner had but just left his work.