Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/212

202 stone implements so immensely beyond the rest of their race, while they remained in other respects in the same low state of civilization, the quality of stone implements would have to be pretty much given up as a test of culture anywhere. Fortunately there is an easier way out of the difficulty. Polished instruments of this green jade have been, long ago or recently, one of the most important items of manufacture in the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and the South Australians may have learnt from some Malay or Polynesian source the art of shaping these high-class weapons. The likelihood of this being their real history is strengthened by proofs we have of intercourse between Australia and the surrounding islands. Besides the known yearly visits of the trepang-fishers of Macassar to the Gulf of Carpentaria, and the appearance of the outrigger-canoe in East Australia in Captain Cook's time, there is mythological evidence which seems to carry proof of connexion far down the east coast.

Another coincidence in patterns of weapons said to come from two distant regions may be mentioned here. There is a well- known New Zealand weapon, the mére, or pátu-pátu. It is an edged club of bone or stone, which has been compared to a beaver's tail, or is still more like a soda-water bottle with the bulb flattened, and it is a very effective weapon in a hand-to-hand fight, a man being often killed by one thrust with its sharp end against the temple. Through the neck it has a hole for a wrist-cord. The mére is made of the bone of a whale, or of stone, and the finest, which are of green jade and worked with immense labour, were among the most precious heirlooms of the Maori Chiefs. One would think that such a peculiar weapon was hardly likely to be made independently by two races; but Klemm gives a drawing of a sharp-edged Peruvian weapon, of dark brown jasper, which is so exactly like the New Zealand mére, even to the wrist-cord, that a single drawing of one of the latter, shown in front and profile in Fig. 19, will serve for both. Another,