they were ready
almost to fall down and worship their new tools, esteeming the axe as a
deity, offering sacrifices to the saw, and holding the knife in
especial veneration.

In the infancy of all nations the same difficulties must have been
experienced for want of tools, before the arts of smelting and working
in metals had become known; and it is not improbable that the
Phoenician navigators who first frequented our coasts found the same
avidity for bronze and iron existing among the poor woad-stained
Britons who flocked down to the shore to see their ships and exchange
food and skins with them, that Captain Cook discovered more than two
thousand years later among the natives of Otaheite and New Zealand.
For, the tools and weapons found in ancient burying-places in all parts
of Britain clearly show that these islands also have passed through the
epoch of stone and flint.

There was recently exhibited at the Crystal Palace a collection of
ancient European weapons and implements placed alongside a similar
collection of articles brought from the South Seas; and they were in
most respects so much alike that it was difficult to believe that they
did not belong to the same race and period, instead of being the
implements of races sundered by half the globe, and living at periods
more than two thousand years apart. Nearly every weapon in the one
collection had its counterpart in the other,--the mauls or celts of
stone, the spearheads of flint or jasper, the arrowheads of flint or
bone, and the saws of jagged stone, showing how human ingenuity, under
like circumstances, had resorted to like expedients. It would also
appear that the ancient tribes in these islands, like the New
Zealanders, used fire to hollow out their larger boats; several
specimens of this kind of vessel having recently been dug up in the
valleys of the Witham and the Clyde, some of the latter from under the
very streets of modern Glasgow.[1] Their smaller boats, or coracles,
were made of osiers interwoven, covered with hides, and rigged with
leathern sails and thong tackle.

It will readily be imagined that anything like civilization, as at
present understood, must have been next to impossible under such
circumstances. "Miserable indeed," says Carlyle, "was the condition of
the aboriginal savage, glaring fiercely from under his fleece of hair,
which with the beard reached down to his loins, and hung round them
like a matted cloak; the rest of his bod