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yesterday, some eighty years old at best; but the flint and
steel enjoys an age reputation actually greater than that
of the Pyramids. In fact, there is every reason to believe
that this has been the method employed in Northern
Europe for making fire as far back as the age of stone
itself, when, for want of steel, man used the nodules of
iron pyrites, such as are found in the chalk and in the
clay beds of various geological formations.
But to go back beyond the historical age of the
tinder-box, the neighbourhood of Brandon was a depot for
flint-work of quite another kind in the Stone Age itself,
when the people of that time made their weapons and
implements of the flint obtained from some old workings
which are now known as Grimes' Graves, These remark-
aide old pits were sunk down to the level of the flint
vein, and in them have been found implements of flint
in every stage of manufacture, together with the curious
pick, fashioned from an antler of the red deer, which was
their rough means of getting out the precious flint. It
is a most interesting fact that the iron-headed pick in use
to-day clearly owes its form to, or in other words, is a
descendant of, this primitive pick-axe.
One of the reasons, if not the sole reason, why this
locality was discovered by primitive Man, and worked ever
since by Man down to our own times, is the very fine
quality of the flint which occurs here. Instead of the
comparatively small and often very branching nodules of
flint, such as we usually find in the upper chalk, the
Brandon flint occurs in massive and compact pieces, often
as large as pillows; the quality, too, is fine and even, so
that the fractures are clean and regular; a very important
thing in making either a gun-flint or an arrow-head.
Curiously enough, the present site whence the flint is
obtained is not near the old Stone-Age workings, nor are
either of the sets of flint-pits in Brandon itself, but in the
vicinity, although the gun-flints are made in the village.
There seems, however, to be a strange survival of primitive
times even in getting the flint out of the ground, for
although the pits have to be sunk some twenty-five to