PREHISTORIC BOMBAY. 151 



occasional visitors, who, on going away, forgot to take with them some 

 of the nteusils they had brought. These bear no signs of fire, and 

 could not, therefore, have been used for cooking. Their weight is 

 so great in proportion to their capacity, that I doubt if they were 

 intended to be used as receptacles for articles to be carried any great 

 distance, and they are too small to have been used for storing. 

 Moreover, when found, they contained nothing but mud. It 

 seems then they were intended to hold something easy of consumption, 

 or difficult of preservation, not intended to be carried any great dis- 

 tance. They might, therefore, have contained the food or drink of 

 some person paying a short visit to the uninhabited island from some 

 neighbouring place. That no traces of such visits arc found else- 

 where than close to the eastern shore, would seem to show that the 

 object of these prehistoric picnicers was the capture of fish or the 

 collection of oysters, and that they came from the East. 



Shortly, then, to sum up what we have spelled out from the pages 

 of our ancient book, we find that the spot on which we stand, and 

 which we are fond of speaking of as " Prima in Lid is," is in fact one 

 of the last made, and last inhabited. For we have seen that the 

 rocks immediately around us were the latest fashioned on these coasts. 

 We have seen how the foundations of our thriving city, now so pic- 

 turesque and pleasant, were laid in scenes of desolation and death, 

 amid the honors of heaving earthquakes, when the land was rent 

 by the fury of volcanic fires, and swept of life by glowing lava floods. 

 We have seen how these were followed by brief intervals of peace, 

 in which the earth, all scarred and shaken as she was, strove once 

 more to clothe herself in her mantle of green, and sustain the young 

 life of her new-born creatures on her bounteous bosom ; but how 

 these were again and again engulphed in fiery death, and buried in 

 successive flows of molten rock, that piled rows of bare arid hills on 

 what had been a level fresh-water plain, a dreary swamp perhaps, 

 yet teeming with vegetation and life. We have seen that when the 

 destroying flood abated, volcanic fires here and there yet broke forth 

 anew, and that the subsidence of more than 1,000 square miles of 

 land upon the coast, perhaps by another effort of the Fire Demon 

 beneath the earth, plunged the mountains of the main-land as islands 

 in the sea. We have seen how this archipelago of rocks, though 



