STONE AGE IN AFRICA. 141 



profoundly ignorant of their properties, they journeyed hundreds of miles, brav- 

 ing the gravest dangers and hardships, to procure flint. As clubs and arrows 

 they employed wood for weapons where flint and iron ore was as easy of access. 

 The historians of De Soto's expedition recount the wounding of one of Mocoso's 

 men, in western Arkansas, as the tattered cavalcade was returning from the plains 

 to the great river, by an Indian in ambush, who sped an arrow that pierced the 

 soldier's iron mail, passed through the muscles of the thigh, penetrated the saddle, 

 and entered the horse's body, nailing the rider fast to his steed. On cutting and 

 extracting the arrow they were astonished to find that it was merely a reed with 

 the end hardened by fire. 



After carefully sifting the glowing romances of Cortez and Bernal Diez, with 

 the embellishments added by almost every historian in that field for the last three 

 and a half centuries, it appears that the Pueblo Aztecs whose communal adobe 

 houses were huddled together in the Mexican lagoon, were yet only in the stone 

 age, possessing no better implements than those made of wood, flint and obsidian, 

 and without knowledge of metals save ornaments of hammered copper and gold. 

 The few objects of bronze; the unique and grotesque sculpturing, and splendid 

 pottery of prehistoric Anahuac are the remains of a more advanced southern 

 people conquered and displaced by the Pueblo horde that swept down upon them 

 from the north, as the Vandals inundated Rome, destroying a culture which they 

 had not the capacity to adopt or imitate. 



Africa presents to the scientists many surprises, and among them possibly the 

 amazing anomaly of a primitive savage people attaining at one bound the stage of 

 development in mechanical arts gained by all other races of mankind, by slow 

 degrees through ages of time and experience. The adoption of mechanical aids 

 and appliances has been the outgrowth of man's necessities and environments, 

 and the evolution of all his arts has been effected by gradual increments suggested 

 by his increasing wants and expanding intellect. To this law Africa may present 

 startling exceptions. As yet its interior is a terra incognita Sind its ethnography an 

 unsolved enigma. Patient and careful research may in future be rewarded with 

 some knowledge of the origin and migrations of its native races. Until exhaust- 

 ive search for archaic remains has been instituted throughout its entire extent we 

 are not warranted in assuming that any of its tribes, because of convenience 

 of hematite, have suddenly sprung from Simian savagery to proficiency in black- 

 smithing. If after thorough search no traces of a stone age are found we must 

 suppose that the aboriginal negroes had not advanced beyond the use of sticks 

 and tinwrought stones when the reduction of iron ore was introduced among 

 them by Asiatic wanderers. 



Virginia, Cass Co., Ills., June lo, 1882. 



