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VIII. 
NOTES OlS" A COLLECTIOIS' OF JS-ATIVE WEAPONS AND 
IMPLEMENTS EIIOM TROPICAL WESTERN AUSTRALIA 
(KIMBERLEY DISTRICT). By EDWARD T. HARDMAN, 
E. R. G. S. I. ; of H. M. Geological Survey ; late Governineiit 
Geologist attached to the Kimberley Surveying Expeditions, 
1883 and 1884. (Plates I., IL, and III.) 
[Read Febkuary 22, 1886.] 
While engaged for some two years on a Geological Survey of parts of 
Western Australia, I made a small collection of native weapons and 
other implements. The following short description of them may be 
interesting to the members of an Academy which has always 
strongly fostered the study of ancient implements, weapons, and 
costumes. 
The specimens exhibited and described in this Paper are not 
numerous, as it was by no means easy to induce the natives to part 
with articles which must have cost them much time and trouble to 
manufacture with the rude means at their disposal. But I have been 
able to secure some specimens which bear such a remarkable resem- 
blance to ancient Irish weapons, that they may possibly be of some 
value as throwing a little light on the manner of, and the mode of, 
using the stone and other implements of pre-historic times. 
Not alone from this point of view are these instruments worthy of 
notice, but in showing, as it were, the dovetailing of ethnological habit 
from the time only recorded by a kitchen-midden down to our own days. 
How many years ago the flint implement-makers of Britain and 
Ireland lived we do not precisely know ; but it is agreed on all sides 
that many thousands of years have elapsed since the stone age in these 
countries. It is therefore the more notable that some of the weapons and 
implements described in this Paper exhibit forms and figures familiar 
to all, both as preserved in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, 
and as depicted in the well-known works of Wilde, Evans, Lubbock, 
Lartet, Pengelly, and Ferguson. 
The resemblance of these Australian stone spear-heads, hatchets, 
chisels, and bone implements, together with the character of the orna- 
