Thus, the New Zealanders, whose tools were also of stone, wood, or bone, made their boats of the trunks of trees hollowed out by fire.
The stone implements were fashioned, Captain Cook says, by rubbing one stone upon another until brought to the required shape; but, after all, they were found very inefficient for their purpose.

They soon became blunted and useless; and the laborious process of making new tools had to be begun again.

The delight of the islanders at being put in possession of a material which was capable of taking a comparatively sharp edge and keeping it, may therefore readily be imagined; and hence the remarkable incidents to which we have referred in the experience of the early voyagers.

In the minds of the natives, iron became the representative of power, efficiency, and wealth; and they were ready almost to fall down and worship their new tools, esteeming the axe as a deity, offering sacrifices to the saw, and holding the knife in especial veneration.
In the infancy of all nations the same difficulties must have been experienced for want of tools, before the arts of smelting and working in metals had become known; and it is not improbable that the Phoenician navigators who first frequented our coasts found the same 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.