considerable variety of form, better adapted to the needs of man,
and with these weapons were found huge stone mortars which had been
used for crushing grain, and bear witness to the use of vegetable diet.

We also meet with important ruins in the Transvaal. Some walls are
still standing which are thirty feet high and ten thick, forming
imperishable memorials of the past. They are built of huge blocks of
granite piled up without cement. We know nothing of those who erected
them; their name and history are alike effaced from the memory of man,
and we know nothing either of their ancestors or of their descendants.

In the Antipodes certain curious discoveries point to the existence
of man in those remote and mysterious times, to which, for want
of a better, we give in Europe the name of the Age of the Mammoth
and the Reindeer; and everything points to the conclusion that
man appeared in the different divisions of the earth about the same
time. Probably the first appearance of our race in Australia was prior
to the last convulsions of nature which gave to that continent its
present configuration. "Scientific studies," says M. Blanchard,[40]
"lead us to believe that at one period a vast continent rose from the
Pacific Ocean, which continent was broken up, and to a great extent
submerged, in convulsions of nature. New Zealand and the neighboring
islands are relics of this great land."

In the Corrio Mountains in New Zealand, at a height of nearly 4,921
feet above the sea-level, have been found flints shaped by the hand of
man, associated with a number of bones of the Dinornis, the largest
known bird. Other facts bear witness to an extinct civilization,
which we believe to have been extremely ancient, but to which, in the
present state of our knowledge, it is impossible to assign a date. In