ANNALS OF THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, No. 6 33 
stone implements used by the Californian Indians resemble, in 
their main purpose and design, those of the extinct races exhumed 
in the shell mounds, only they are conspicuously ruder and simpler. 
Take the stone mortar, for instance. The prehistorical mortar is 
carefully dressed on the outside, and has three general shapes," 
which he goes on to specify. " But the Indian now takes a small 
bowlder of trap or greenstone, and beats out a hollow in it, leaving 
the outside rough. Whenever one is seen in possession of a mortar 
dressed on the outside, he will acknowledge that he did not make it , 
but found it — in other words, it is prehistoric. The prehistorics 
used handsomely dressed pestles sometimes embellished with rings, 
but the squaw nowadays simply picks up a long slender cobble 
from the brook." Mr. Powers' figure of the ringed pestle (if pestle 
it was originally) is to be seen enlarged in de Quartref ages' ''Races 
Humaine," p. 103, and may be compared with Plate XIV., 
a representation of the Papuan implement. Had this latter 
been nothing more than a pestle, it would have been reason- 
able, almost necessary, to suppose that, wherever it was 
made, stone mortars similar to those utilized by the irreverent 
Yokuts, were also in use. Such mortars are believed to be 
unknown in the New Guinea of the present day where the 
grinding apparatus, apart from the small betel-nut mortars, consists, 
like of those of Yokut make, of a rough block of stone superficially 
hollowed and of a rounded pebble for an upper mill stone ; the 
whole but little superior to the grinding slabs of Australia. But 
notwithstanding that the longitudinal groove may have been 
added subsequently to the formation of a pestle to adapt it to 
other purposes, a groove, the result of sharpening weapons on it, 
would not pass through the flange. It is perhaps safer to regard 
the implement as originally a tool or weapon which has incidentally 
been put to use in some ordinary grinding cavity. Even so, the 
difficulty of accounting for its occurrence and mystical value in 
New Guinea is by no means removed, scarcely lessened. It seems 
not only different from, but in its way superior to anything made 
there now. The reversible mount of the ordinary Papuan axe 
is indeed a well devised improvement on the fashion of fixing 
a blade in one position in a straight haft, and were it certainly 
an indigenous device, would be creditable to Papuan ingenuity ; 
but the clubstones and picks, whether perforated to receive the 
haft or designed to fit into a perforation in the haft, are unprovided 
with any means by which they can be immoveably fixed in place, 
and are so far inferior in design. As for the heads of the straight- 
shafted Tugeri clubs, they are the merest crudities beside this 
sorcery charm. A stone or other object made by human hands 
to some useful end is not likely to pass into the domain of magic or 
worship as long as it remains in familiar use, unless in reverence 
of that use, or being unused, as long as the knowledge of its 
origin is recent, unless it has been derived from some awe-inspiring 
