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.*
[footnote...
"Mr.John Buchanan, a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us
that in the course of the eight years preceding that date, no less
than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt [of the
valley of the Clyde], and that he had personally inspected a large
number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in