No ancient coin has been found; all the pottery, porcelain, and glass fragments indicate comparatively modern oriental ware which might have been introduced at any date between the 15th and the 17th centuries. Yet most of these last discoveries, though made at a considerable depth below the surface under the oldest ruins, come from places where they might have been buried in recent times, and do not really militate against the theory that the finest masonry work of Zimbabwe and kindred establishments dates from a period of 2000 years ago or earlier. No one who really knows the negro of Africa, south of the Sahara desert, can easily believe that the hundreds of stone-built towns, villages and forts of ancient appearance in southern Rhodesia were built, unaided and uninspired, by a pure negro race, or doubt even that these works (I am referring to those of perfect construction) were the outcome of some foreign invasion of south-east Africa at a period of unfixed history prior to the 7th century of the Christian era. We know of no negro, scarcely any negroid, race of Africa which, left to itself and of its own inspiration, has taken to building in stone. The great metal-working tribes of the Congo basin which developed a really remarkable native art—the Bushongo, for example, a race more negroid than negro—nevertheless ignored stone as a building material or an object of worship. Between southern Congoland or Nyasaland on the north and Mashonaland on the south nothing has ever been discovered hitherto which indicates the existence in former times of a stone-building race of negroes or negroids, or of the path followed through the, until recently, barbarous regions of Zambezia and Moçambique by the possible ancestors of the people who built the Zimbabwe and similar monuments.