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 In the extensive tracts occupied by sands and clays, and in which no stone fit for tools is to be obtained, the natives must have cast wistful eyes towards the more favored localities where all the best materials for stone implements are to be found; and one may conjecture how they would humble themselves and entreat those who could supply them with good materials. Their best feathers, their best woods, their favorite skins, and even their wives and daughters, would be offered in exchange for the basalts and diorites which occur on and in the neighbourhood of the Great Range.

The stone tomahawk is all-important to the native, and in some districts he could scarcely maintain existence without it.

The natives of Victoria, according to the information I have obtained, appear to have used the one-edged tomahawk exclusively. I have not found a single example of the two-edged tomahawk in Victoria. Their Merring, Karr-geing, Kal-baling-elarek, or Kul-bul-en-ur-uk, in this respect, and also in its being ground and sharpened, differs from the tomahawk of the West Australian natives, which is made of granular quartzose granite or of quartz-rock, and fashioned by repeated blows until the desired shape is attained. It will be seen, too, that the wooden handle is different.

The opinion entertained by many archaeologists that ground and polished tools belong to the Neolithic period, and those made by successive blows to the Palæolithic period, is reasonable enough, and probably, as regards some extinct races, true; but we have here in Australia, on the east, highly-polished implements, and on the west, in districts where rocks susceptible of polish are not to be obtained, rude stone axes made by a succession of blows. There is no method by which we can distinguish a difference of period if we examine stone implements. In the hands of a native of Australia you see a highly-polished stone axe of diorite and a knife or adze of granular quartzite or porcelainite made by blows, and which could not be easily ground by any contrivance