figures to be sepulchral monuments. He managed to make a considerable
collection of crania and human bones. Round about the crater of the
Rana-Raraku volcano, forty of these figures have been counted, all
of a similar type, all cut in one piece of solid trachyte rock. In
another place are eighty busts with longer noses and thicker lips,
forming a group by themselves. The largest of them is some thirty-nine
feet high. On the sides of the volcano, scattered about amongst
the statues, have been picked up a considerable number of knives,
scrapers, and pointed pieces of obsidian, which were probably tools
thrown away by the sculptors of the figures.

These monuments and sculptures are certainly the work of a race very
different from the present natives, who are altogether incapable of
producing anything of the kind, and who retain absolutely no traditions
respecting their predecessors. This complete oblivion, which may appear
rather strange, is by no means rare amongst savage races, and Sir John
Lubbock cites a great many very curious examples. "Oral traditions,"
says Broca, "are changed and distorted by each succeeding generation;
and are at last effaced to give place to others as transitory,
and thus the most important events are, sooner or later, relegated
to oblivion."[43]

We have dwelt at considerable length in another volume[44] on the
earliest inhabitants of America. Much still remains unknown in spite of
the considerable and important work done of late years. The very name
of the New World seems to be altogether out of place, America being as
old, if not older, than any continent of the Eastern Hemisphere. Lund
has brought forward weighty reasons for his theory that the central
plateau of Brazil was already a country when the rest of the continent
was still submerged or at least repre. sented merely by a few small