Shelford. The stones were basalt, and those in some ovens on Silurian ground had been carried thither by the blacks, who had evidently recognised the superior heat-enduring and heat-retaining properties of that rock. Mr. Etheridge, formerly of the Geological Survey, noticed the same facts in the McIvor district, and stated that he saw there, in ovens, fragments of basalt that must have been carried several miles.
The stone implements used by the natives of Tasmania are described in another place. From information most kindly communicated by Ronald Gunn, Esq., F.R.S., Dr. Agnew, the Honorary Secretary of the Royal Society of Tasmania, and the Rev. Mr. Kane, it appears that the natives of that island had no stone implements that can be regarded as tomahawks. They used stones roughly shaped by blows, so as to get a cutting edge, for skinning animals, cleaning skins, shaping clubs, &c.; but they were not fastened to wooden handles, as the Australian axes are.
It will be seen, on referring to the detailed descriptions of the Australian axes, that many of them are very beautiful implements, well-formed, well-balanced, and with cutting edges of equal finely-executed curves. They indeed, in the best examples, greatly resemble, in the form of the cutting edge, the American axe, which is considered by woodmen the best implement of this kind that has yet been invented.
It is remarkable that no stone hatchet, chip of basalt, or stone knife has been found anywhere in Victoria except on the surface of the ground or a few inches beneath the surface. It is true that fragments of tomahawks and bone-needles have been dug out of Mirrn-yong heaps on the sea-coast, covered wholly or partially by blown sand; but though some hundreds of square miles of alluvia have been turned over in mining for gold, not a trace of any work of human hands has been discovered. Some of the drifts are not more than three or four feet in thickness (from the surface to the bed-rock), and the fact that no Aboriginal implement, no bone belonging to man, has been met with, is startling and perplexing.
Within quite recent periods—at various times since the colony was occupied by the white race—large rivers, like the Snowy River in Gippsland, have in some places changed their beds; creeks have cut through bends of a horseshoe shape, and rivulets have made for themselves new channels. Such old beds and channels in many parts have been completely dug over by gold-miners, and the detritus and debris have been washed; but, as far as I know, there has not been recorded any discovery of native implements. In much older gravels, clays, and sands, underlying Recent Volcanic rocks, where occur fossil fruits belonging to genera now found only in the northern parts of Australia, the miner has carried his explorations; but nothing belonging to man has been seen. More recent deposits, in which are imbedded trunks of trees, and where the cones of the Banksia, leaves of several species of eucalypts, and remains of marsupials, are of common occurrence, are likewise barren. The tracts where, over a large area, volcanic ash, some thirty or forty feet in thickness, overlies a grass-clad surface once trod by the native dog, and on which his bones are found, retain no trace of the native. Even the caves
