Conradus Leemans

“ It is difficult to decide whether the finer kinds of stone may not have been manufactured at a period, when the construction of similar implements in metal was already known, and even for some time after. This is the more probable, since metal might not as yet have answered all purposes. ”

“ We may in general assume that the inhabitants of every country, in its rude state, have availed themselves, in order to make the tools and implements requisite for supplying their primitive wants, of such materials as they could most easily obtain, viz., stone, shells, bones, and fishes' teeth. ”

“ In its principal features the whole has preserved the form of an oblong flattened pebble, having undergone a natural preparatory process of friction by water, to which art has indeed had little to add in order to adapt the pebble to its intended design as an implement or weapon. ”

“ The wedges of this fourth class, as well as the curved wedges of the second class (c, b) , exhibit a marked deviation from any others which have hitherto come to our knowledge, and seem peculiar to Java as distinguished from those which North Europe, Asia, and North and Central America have supplied. ”

“ However versed in the working of all sorts of metals, the natives do not at present know the art of cutting or grinding stones equal in hardness to quartz, much less of forming from them such sharp-edged and polished implements. ”

“ In the first class I place those wedges, whose broad surfaces are worked convex, becoming thinner towards the sides without presenting lateral planes, even of the smallest size. Underneath they are ground more or less sharply from one broad surface to the other. A section of the upper part is considerably smaller than that of the lower. It often even tapers in some degree to a point. ”

“ It appears, when put to the test, that these implements are peculiarly adapted for such uses, and that, if they were made expressly for this purpose, no better form or fitter material could have been adopted. Dr. Junghuhn has for many years employed a wedge of this sort for smoothing the surface of his paper, whenever he had to execute minute drawings. ”