422 
MAORI MIDDENS. 
every other trace of ancient civilization was lost. So likewise 
the Maori, or Indo-Australasian, must be viewed as another 
off-set from the same stock, still preserving, like the Celt, 
the ancient Hindu way of manufacturing their mats, as well 
as many remnants of the same tongue and mythology. 
Hence the German and Maori savages, both springing from 
one source, seem to claim a common ancestry, and, if not 
an identity of origin, at any rate one of mind. 
A doubt, however, must be expressed, whether man had 
anything to do with some of those pre-historic articles ; in 
Australia some specimens were obtained of small fragments 
of bone two or three inches long, evidently belonging to 
large-sized animals. The donor was a gentleman who had 
a sheep station in the interior : he said, if memory serves, 
on the New England plains there was a regular stratum 
of such bones imbedded in a black soil at a considerable 
depth, that they were all similarly fractured with sharp edges 
and of nearly the same size, that not a single entire bone had 
been met with ; the specimens given me I transferred to 
Professor Owen. 
A natural query arises : by what agency were they thus 
broken up ? transported in such quantities, and deposited in 
that black mould on those plains, had that been a grand 
native manufactory of barbs for spears, or was this fracturing 
an act of nature ? all had sharp edges, showing that they 
had been brought there, without any of the grinding effects 
which would have occurred if subjected to the violent action 
of water. It may also be noticed that flints are easily frac- 
tured by a gentle blow, or by frost, and that many thus 
made are marvellously like pre-historic remains. All the 
theories about the stone age have been founded on the sup- 
position of its marking an early period of mankind, a sort of 
primaeval epoch, when man emerged from a still lower or 
bestial state to a higher, the commencement of which was 
marked by the use of stone implements. But this evidently 
does not apply to the Maori, for they have traditions of their 
arrival in New Zealand, and have preserved both the names 
of the canoes which brought them, and the chiefs who came 
