These MICRONESIANS were the peoples of the Mariana or Ladrone, Palao (Pelew), Caroline, Marshall, and Gilbert Islands. They were of mixed elements, partly Polynesian (which is to say semi-Caucasian), partly Mongolian, and in some degree Papuan, but many of them bear a remarkable facial resemblance to the Amerindians of North and South America. This may arise partly from the partial colonization of these archipelagoes of small islands in the western Pacific by immigrants from Japan and China, mostly shipwrecked mariners. This intermixture has imparted a "Tatar" look to some of the Micronesians, just as the same facial features in the Amerindian are undoubtedly derived from ancient migrations taking place in prehistoric times from Siberia and Japan into north-west America. On the whole the Micronesians are most nearly allied to the Polynesian group of peoples to the south of them, though their languages form quite a separate group. Before Europeans discovered them they ignored the use of metal; their implements were made of stone, of sharks' and whales' teeth, of sharp-edged bivalve shells, of cane, and wood. They had a great reverence for stones, both as objects of worship and as money. This feeling would almost seem to be due to the remembrance of more remote times, when there dwelt in these and perhaps other Pacific archipelagoes a wonderful race of stonebuilders, who may have been the Caucasian ancestors of the modern Polynesians and akin to that European Neolithic race which ranged across the Old World from Ireland to Korea, and over the Australasian islands from Sumatra to Easter Island. A section of these Neolithic stonebuilders seems to have sojourned for a time in the Caroline Islands, one of the Micronesian archipelagoes. Here they constructed forts, palaces, quays, out of immense blocks of stone, shaped ready hewn, so to speak, by the hand of Nature: for they were cubes and four-sided prisms of basalt (like the formations at the Giant's Causeway in Ireland), the remains of ancient volcanic eruptions on the larger islands of the Caroline group. Besides the stone buildings (which were erected, like all ancient stonework, by placing block on block, without any binding mortar between) this vanished race constructed artificial canals and harbours. Their prosperity and civilization seem to have come to an end--perhaps they emigrated to America and founded some of the prehistoric civilizations there--through the partial subsidence of the Micronesian islands. Many of these ancient stone buildings are now partly under water, and there is other evidence which shows that these and other Pacific groups of islands were larger in extent several thousand years ago than they are now. The modern Micronesians may be in part descended from the great race of stonebuilders, but they have much degenerated in civilization, as has been the case with the people of Egypt and the Amerindians of Peru and Mexico.