534 FOSSILS. Chap. XXV. 



In Africa, the whole country looks, for all that man has done, 

 just as it did when it came from the hands of its Maker. 

 The only roads are footpaths worn by the feet of the natives 

 into hollows a few inches deep, and about fifteen or eighteen 

 inches wide, winding from village to village, as if made by 

 believers in the curved line being that of beauty, or by 

 people who had already attained that state of competence 

 to which we all aspire, when we may toddle round our 

 own little wavy walks without hurry. The huts built 

 here have no ruins, except when they are burned, and 

 then a thin layer of the red clay, with which they were 

 plastered, and the impressions of the reeds which formed 

 the walls, remain with the colour and consistence of soft 

 bricks. But these soon moulder away; the only durable 

 monuments to be met with, are mill-stones, worn in the 

 middle a couple of inches or more in depth; and cairns 

 in the passes of the mountains, of which tradition has no 

 record, but the salutation addressed to them — " Hail ! 

 Chief — let it be well with us in the country to which we 

 are going ! " — may mean, that they are supposed to be the 

 resting-places of departed Chiefs. 



It is a very remarkable fact, that while in many parts of 

 the world the stone, bronze, and iron instruments of men who 

 have passed away have been found, no flint arrow-heads, 

 spears, axes, or other implements of this kind, as far as we 

 can ascertain, have ever been discovered in Africa. Dr. Kirk, 

 while botanizing in the Delta of the Zambesi, came upon a bed 

 of gravel, in which the fossil bones of nearly all the animals 

 now living in the country, as hippopotami, wild hogs, buffaloes, 

 antelopes, turtles, crocodiles, and hyenas, were associated with 

 pottery of the same nature and ornamental designs, as that 

 now in common use by the inhabitants. Similar animal 

 remains were observed in a bed of gravel in the Zambesi in 



