Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/213

Rh stated to be from Cuzco, of a greenish amphibolic stone, is figured by Rivero and Tschudi, curiously enough, in company with a wooden war-club from Tunga in Colombia, which is hardly distinguishable from a common Polynesian form. If we knew of any connexion between the civilizations of Peru and the South Sea Islands, these extraordinary resemblances might be accounted for as caused by direct transmission.

When, however, their full value has been given to the differences in the productions of the Ground Stone Age, there remains a residue of a most remarkable kind. In the first place, a very small number of classes, flake-knives, scrapers, spear and arrow-heads, celts and hammers, take in the great mass of specimens in museums; and in the second place, the prevailing character of these implements, whether modern or thousands of years old, whether found on this side of the world or the other, is a marked uniformity. The ethnographer who has studied the stone implements of Europe, Asia, North or South America, or Polynesia, may consider the specimens from the district he has studied, as types from which those of other districts differ, as a class, by the presence or absence of a few peculiar instruments, and individually in more or less important details of shape and finish, unless, as sometimes happens, they do not perceptibly differ at all. So great is this uniformity in the stone implements of different places and times, that it goes far to neutralise their value as distinctive of different races. It is clear that no great help in tracing the minute history of the growth and migration of tribes, is to be got from an arrow-head which might have come from Patagonia, or Siberia, or the Isle of Man, or from a celt which might be, for all its appearance shows, Mexican, Irish, or Tahitian. If an observer, tolerably acquainted with stone implements, had an unticketed collection placed before him, the largeness of the number of specimens which he would not confidently assign, by mere inspection, to their proper countries, would serve as a fair measure of their general uniformity. Even when aided by mineralogical