was usually a bamboo cane, about an inch in diameter, and twelve or eighteen inches long. The joint in the cane formed one end of the flute; the aperture through which it was blown was close to the end; it seldom had more than four holes, three in the upper side, covered with the fingers, and one beneath, against which the thumb was placed. Sometimes, however, there were four holes on the upper side. It was occasionally plain, but more frequently ornamented, by being scorched or burnt with a hot stone, or having fine and beautifully plaited strings of human hair wound round it alternately, with rings of neatly braided cinet. It was not blown from the mouth but the nostril. The performer usually placed the thumb of the right hand upon the right nostril, applied the aperture of the flute, which he held with the fingers of his right hand, to the other nostril, and moving his fingers on the holes, produced the music. The sound was soft and not unpleasant, though the notes were few; it was generally played in a plaintive strain, though frequently used as an accompaniment to their pelies, or songs. These were closely identified both with the music and the dances. The ihara, the drum, and the flute were generally accompanied by the song, as was also the native dance."

It is important to observe, that no barbarous tribe claims the invention of any of the arts in which it displays special ingenuity. The invention is invariably ascribed to the gods, or to some deified ancestor. The New Zealanders are expert fishermen, though their hooks are clumsy. They ascribe the art of constructing nets to their deity Mawè, and hence it is practised under the sanction of religion. Mr. Polack gives us the following account of the fishing apparatus employed by the New Zealanders.

"Fishing nets of various kinds are used, of excellent

quality, and have not the rude stamp that characterizes the form and substance of the generality of their instruments. Some of the seines are of enormous extent, and are made by each family in a village working a certain portion of raw flax, which is quickly ripped with the finger-nails into strips, the boon, or useless gummy matter at the lateral parts being discarded. These narrow strips are tied up in bundles, and left to dry on poles in the air. Flax nets, thus made, are remarkably tough, and resist decay for a long time. After being made use of, they are carefully folded up (some of them are about two thousand feet long) and placed on a wata, or small scaffold. While in progress of manufacture, the workmen are placed under a strict tapu (religious separation), probably an invention thus introduced by a wise observer,* to attach this fickle people to the attainment of one object at once, which they would be doubtless disinclined to follow without some such stimulant. Land-nets are also in frequent use, one of them is in the form of a bag suspended from a hoop, and fixed to a pole; this net is found to be extremely serviceable in fishing for the kolinda, or cray-fish, that congregate among the rocks in certain places very numerously; they are sought after by the feet of the fisher, who places his net near to the fish, and with a dexterous jerk, tumbles the scaly prize into it.

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Fishing baskets, made from a variety of liands, or creepers, that almost form vegetable nets in the dense forests, formed of a large capacity below, and narrowing to a small compass at the mouth, are also made use of to entrap the finny tribes, from which escape is impossible." The seine is so considerable an advance in art, and so

* More probably a superstition derived from the supposed divine origin of the art.

far beyond the average of inventions possessed by the New Zealanders, that we cannot avoid believing, that owing to the great abundance of fish on the coast it was preserved when the knowledge of other implements was lost, or that it was introduced by some more civilized foreigners. So late as the close of the seventh century, the inhabitants of Sussex had no means of taking the fish that abounded on their coast, until they were taught by Wilfred, the exiled Archbishop of York, and gratitude for this benefit is assigned by the ecclesiastical historians as one of the principal causes of their prompt conversion.

But although arts advance simultaneously, they are found to present great discrepancies in their decline. Of all the arts possessed by the people of the Pharaohs, the Copts scarce retain any but the hatching of chickens by artificial heat, but in this they have not been surpassed by any other nation. The Hindoos retain their skill in the manufacture of jewelry, and the descendants of the Peruvians are still eminent as lapidaries, though many useful arts possessed by their ancestors have been forgotten.

It would be easy to multiply examples, but those we have mentioned are sufficient for our argument. Mr. Polack, who has with equal care and ability examined the arts and the traditions of the New Zealanders, and compared them with those of other barbarous nations, thus forcibly gives his testimony to the fact, that the elements of civilization which they possess are inherited from ancestors superior to the present race in intelligence.

After detailing their mythic account of the origin of their nation, he says, "The origin of such fables is lost in the gross traditions of the people, but probably they relate to the earliest of the colonial ancestry of the present descendants, who, gifted with a portion of the knowledge

of the civilized tribes from whom they emanated in Asia, communicated to their children a limited account of those arts and inventions; but obliged by the scarcity of animal and vegetable food in the new country, to devote the principal portion of their time and that of their children towards producing subsistence; and deprived of those monuments of art they had been accustomed to view in their own country, and unable to give in idea similar knowledge to their children, which had been familiar to them in substance, the latter gradually sunk into the barbarism they have displayed for some centuries past; their superstitions accumulating as each generation was further removed from the earliest inhabitants, whose superior civilization, which they had imperfectly disseminated, inspired those unpolished children with a spirit of divine admiration. Probably aware that religious ceremonials would alone act as a check on a nation without the means of improving their uncivilized state, the dying patriarchs claimed in consequence divine honours, which they were enabled to effect by improving upon the unqualified devotion displayed by their admiring descendants."

We find then, nearly in all barbarous nations, the relics of a more ancient system of civilization far superior to that which they at present possess; and traditions ascribing the invention of each of these better processes to some celestial being. The same fact meets us in the early history of most civilized nations: the ancient Greeks, like the modern islanders of the South Sea, averred that they received the first elements of civilization from the gods, that is, from a race of beings more perfect than themselves. There is a universal consent that the first impulses to improvement were received from a foreign source, and no tribe or nation has yet been found that asserted the spontaneous development of its civilization.

CHAPTER XI.

EVIDENCES OF LOST CIVILIZATION.

WHEN North America was first discovered by Europeans, it was found inhabited by barbarous races, unacquainted with most of the common arts of life. Among the most savage of these Indians were the inhabitants of the wilds on the Mississippi and Ohio, who not only were destitute of civilization, but seemed utterly incapable of appreciating its blessings. Centuries elapsed; the red men, untamed and untamable, retired before the skill, enterprise, and science of the Anglo-Americans; their forests fell beneath the axe, the tangled thickets which covered their soil were cleared away by the cultivator, but their labours, instead of revealing a virgin soil, have exhibited to the wondering colonists unquestionable traces of the existence in these regions, at an unknown but very remote age, of a highly civilized race, whose very name has been lost to history.

Vestiges of tumuli, fortified encampments, mounds and trenches, are found in Western America as far north as the range of the buffalo; their western limit is not known; but on the south they extend through the isthmus of Darien to Peru.* They vary in construction according to the nature of the soil in the north they are principally built of

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* It may be necessary to state that part of this description (ut quid lam notum propriumque) is taken from an article contributed to the Athenæum, by permission of the proprietors.