the Rovuma, and they probably supplanted
the Manganja, an operation which we see going on at the present day.

_4th August, 1866._--An hour and a half brought us to Miule, a village
on the same level with Mbanga; and the chief pressing us to stay, on
the plea of our sleeping two nights in the jungle, instead of one if
we left early next morning, we consented. I asked him what had become
of the very large iron-smelting population of this region; he said
many had died of famine, others had fled to the west of Nyassa: the
famine is the usual effect of slave wars, and much death is thereby
caused--probably much more than by the journey to the coast. He had
never heard any tradition of stone hatchets having been used, nor of
stone spear-heads or arrowheads of that material, nor had he heard of
any being turned up by the women in hoeing. The Makonde, as we saw,
use wooden spears where iron is scarce. I saw wooden hoes used for
tilling the soil in the Bechuana and Bataka countries, but never stone
ones. In 1841 I saw a Bushwoman in the Cape Colony with a round stone
and a hole through it; on being asked she showed me how it was used by
inserting the top of a digging-stick into it, and digging a root. The
stone was to give the stick weight.

[Illustration.]

The stones still used as anvils and sledge-hammers by many of the
African smiths, when considered from their point of view, show sounder
sense than if they were burdened with the great weights we use. They
are unacquainted with the process of case-hardening, which, applied to
certain parts of our anvils, gives them their usefulness, and an anvil
of their soft iron would not do so well as a hard stone. It is true a
small light one might be made, but let any one see how the hammers of
their iron bevel over and round in the faces with a little work, and
he will perceive that only a wild freak would induce any sensible
native smith to make a mass equal to a sledge-hammer, and burden
himself with a weight for what can be better performed by a stone. If
people are settled, as on the coast, then they gladly use any mass of
cast iron they may find, but never where, as in the interior, they
have no certainty of remaining any length of time in one spot.

_5th August, 1866._--We left Miule, and commenced our march towards
Lake Nyassa, and slept at the last of the streams that flow to the
Loendi. In Mataka's vicinity, N.E., there is a perfect brush of
streams flowing to that river