These earthenware vessels, and fragments of others of a finer texture, were found in the delta of the Zambesi and in other parts in close association with fossil bones, which, on being touched by the tongue, showed as complete an absence of animal matter as the most ancient fossils known in Europe.

They were the bones of animals, as hippopotami, water hogs, antelopes, crocodiles, identical with those now living in the country.

These were the primitive fauna of Africa, and if vitrified iron from the prodigious number of broken smelting furnaces all over the country was known from the remotest times, the Africans seem to have had a start in the race, at a time when our progenitors were grubbing up flints to save a miserable existence by the game they might kill.

Slave-trading seems to have been coeval with the knowledge of iron.

The monuments of Egypt show that this curse has venerable antiquity.