202 



THE STONE AGE — PAST AKD PRESENT. 



labour, were among the most precious heirlooms of the Maori 

 Chiefs. One would think that such a peculiar weapon was 

 hardly likely to be made independently by 

 two races; but Klemm gives a drawing of a 

 sharp-edged Peruvian weapon, of dark brown 

 jasper/ which is so exactly like the New Zea- 

 land mere, even to the wrist-cord, that a single 

 drawing of one of the latter, shown in front 

 and profile in Fig. 19, will serve for both. 

 There can hardly be a mistake about this 

 weapon being really Peruvian, for another 

 from Cuzco, of a greenish amphibolic stone, 

 is figured by Rivero and Tschudi," curiously 

 enough, in company with a wooden war-club. 

 Fig. 19. from Tunga in Colombia which is hardly distin- 



guishable from a common Polynesian form. If we knew of any 

 connexion between the civilizations of Peru and the South Sea 

 Islands, these extraordinary resemblances might be accounted 

 for without hesitation, as caused by direct transmission. 



When, however, their full value has been given to the dif- 

 ferences in the productions of the Ground Stone Age, there 

 remains a residue of a most remarkable kind. In the first 

 place, a very small number of classes, flake-knives, scrapers, 

 spear and arrow-heads, celts and hammers, take in the great 

 mass of specimens in museums ; and in the second place, the 

 prevailing character of these implements, whether modern or 

 thousands of years old, whether found on this side of the world 

 or the other, is a marked uniformity. The Ethnographer who 

 has studied the stone implements of Europe, Asia, North or 

 South America, or Polynesia, may consider the specimens from 

 the district he has studied, as types from which those of other 

 districts difier, as a class, by the presence or absence of a few 

 peculiar instruments, and individually in more or less impor- 

 tant details of shape and finish, rmless, as sometimes happens, 

 they do not perceptibly differ at all. So great is this uni- 

 formity in the stone implements of difi"erent places and times, 



1 Klemm, C. W., part ii. p. 26. 



^ Eivero & Tschudi, Ant. Per. Plates, pi, xxxiii. - 



