Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/230

220 they could get them, for the angular pieces of stone with which their lances and jagged knives were mounted. The Christy Museum contains some interesting specimens of these Australian instruments, which date themselves in a curious way as belonging to the time of contact with Europeans. They were originally set with stone teeth; but where these have been knocked out, their places have been filled by new ones of broken glass.

To complete the survey of the Stone Age and its traces in the world, Africa has now to be more fully examined. This great continent is now entirely in the Iron Age. The tribes who do not smelt their own iron, as the Bushmen, get their supplies from others; and in the immense central and western tracts above the Equator, there appears to be no record of tribes living without it. In South Africa, however, the case is different; and the accounts of the English voyages round the Cape of Good Hope about the beginning of the seventeenth century, collected in Purchas's 'Pilgrimes,' give quite a clear history of the transition from the Stone to the Iron Age, which was then taking place.

Then, as now, the inhabitants of Madagascar had their iron knives and spear-heads; and they would have silver in payment for their cattle, 1s. for a sheep, and 3s. 6d. for a cow. But on the West African coast, north of the Cape, there we're pastoral tribes, probably Hottentots, who evidently did not know then, as they do now, how to work the abundant iron ore of their country. At Saldanha Bay, in 1598, John Davis could get fat-tailed sheep and bullocks for bits of old iron and nails, and in 1604 a great bullock was still to be bought for a piece of an old iron hoop. But only seven years later, Nicholas Dounton, "Captaine of the Pepper-Come," begins to write ruefully of the change in this delightful state of things. "Saldania having in former time been comfortable to all our nation travelling this way, both outwards and homewards, yeelding them abundance of flesh, as sheepe and beeves brought downe by the saluage inhabitants, and sold for trifles, as a beife for a piece of an iron hoope of foureteene inches long, and a sheepe for a lesser piece;" but now this is at an end, spoilt perhaps by the Dutch-