SOME ETHNOGRAPHIC PHASES OF CONCHOLOGY. 391 



To the absence of all knowledge of the metallurgic arts among 

 primitive nomade tribes, or to the want of the metals themselves, as 

 among the natives of the Australasian Archipelago, may be ascribed 

 many of the economic uses to which sea shells have been so widely 

 applied. They illustrate in a striking manner the adaptability of man 

 to the most varied physical conditions of the globe, and frequently 

 exhibit the imperfectly developed reasoning faculties of the savage, 

 working within narrow limits, akin to the instincts of the lower 

 animals. Thus we find curious accidental affinities between the rude 

 primitive arts of the European savage in the dim dawn of the ancient 

 world's prehistoric centuries, the equally rude arts of the Carib or 

 the Guanche of the Antilles when brought to the knowledge of the 

 old world in the fifteenth century, and the simple devices of the 

 Polynesians occupying the Volcanic, or Coral Islands of the Southern 

 Ocean, first visited by Europeans in the eighteenth century. Owing 

 to the absence, on many of the islands of the Australian Archipelago, 

 not only of metals, but even of stone and wood, marine shells form 

 the most important available material alike for economic utility and 

 ornament ; and the same appears to have been the case, to a great 

 extent, among the Indians of the Antilles in ante-Columbian centuries. 

 The extreme beauty of many of the marine productions of the tropics 

 and the Southern Ocean, sufficiently accounts for their adoption for 

 personal adornment, as in the case of the Cyprcea mirantia, or beau- 

 tiful orange cowry, of which specimens are rarely to be met with un- 

 drilled, owing to its use as a favorite ornament of the natives of the 

 Friendly Islands. But these spoils of the ocean acquire an additional 

 value, when, as in Central Africa, or among the American Indians 

 around the head waters of the Mississippi, they have all the added 

 virtues which rarity confers. Dr. Livingston, when leaving the 

 Belondas after a brief sojourn among them, thus records his friendly 

 parting with their chief : " As the last proof of friendship, Shinto 

 came into my tent, though it could scarcely contain more than one 

 person, looked at all the curiosities, the quicksilver, the looking-glass, 

 books, hair brushes, comb, watch, &c., &c,, with the greatest interest ; 

 then closing the tent, so that none of his people might see the ex- 

 travagance of which he was about to be guilty, he drew out from his 

 clothing a string of beads, and the end of a conical shell, which is 

 considered, in regions far from the sea, of as great value as the Lord 

 Mayor's badge is in London, He hung it round my neck, and said, 



