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conditions ? The bone-pointed lance, the flint arrow-head, 
and the stone hatchet of the Red Indian, the New Zealander, 
and the aboriginal inhabitant of Great Britain are frequently 
identical. I had the honour to exhibit two stone hatchets 
from the Leeds Museum at the meeting of the British 
Association at Aberdeen, in 1859. One was found in a 
limestone cave near Settle, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 
with various other ancient British relics. The other was 
brought from Tahiti. It is difficult to distinguish one 
from the other ; but still more difficult to imagine that the 
art of fabricating this primitive tool could have been imparted 
to the New Zealander by the aboriginal Yorkshireman, or, 
vice versa, by the New Zealand savage to the ancient Briton. 
The stones of an artificial cromleach are often comparatively 
light and easily removed. The natural or instinctive resource 
under such insecure conditions would be to conceal it under a 
mound of earth or heap of stones as the locality could afford. 
This is the probable history of the earthern "tumulus," or 
stone " cairns," perhaps the prototypes of these stupendous 
pyramidical structures of the more civilised Egyptians. 
"We find them accordingly, like the cromleach, of similar 
form and construction in the remotest and most widely- 
separated parts of the globe. This would offer a more simple 
and natural explanation of those universal erections, than the 
dreamy visions of certain ethnologists, who will only see in 
them the vestiges or landmarks of improbable human 
migrations, of which they offered us no more satisfactory 
evidence than the ingenious speculations of philologists, who 
find in language such a plastic material that they can mould 
it into any form to suit their own preconceived theories. 
Amongst the other megalithic wonders, the erection of 
which have been popularly assigned to supernatural agency, 
none is more striking than the " Rocking Stone." For ages 
this supposed structure has been a great archaeological 
