[Illustration: FIG. 50.—Clyde Stone Axe.] In this view of the case, the canoe of America is the type of a developed instinct pregnant with many suggestive thoughts for us; and the traces of the primeval ship-builder’s art accumulate wonderfully so soon as attention is drawn to it. On the banks of the Clyde, the voyager from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and pleasure for us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the fore-hammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel appliances of iron ship-building, tell of the modern era of steam; but, meanwhile, underneath these very ship-builders’ yards lie the memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back, up the stream of human history, far into prehistoric times. The earliest recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt designation of St. Enoch’s croft. It was hewn out of a single oak, and within it, near the prow, lay a beautifully finished stone axe or celt, represented here (Fig. 50), doubtless one of the simple implements with which this primitive ship of the Clyde had been fashioned into shape. At least sixteen other canoes have been since brought to light; some of them buried many feet underneath sites occupied by the most ancient structures of the city of Glasgow. It is difficult to apply any satisfactory test whereby to gauge the lapse of centuries since this primitive fleet plied in the far-inland estuary that then occupied the area through which the Clyde has wrought its later channel; but that the changes in geological, no less than in technological, aspects indicate a greatly prolonged interval, cannot admit of doubt. Yet primitive man, alike in Africa and in the New World, is still practising the rude ingenuity of the same boat-builder’s art which the allophylian of the Clyde pursued in that remote dawn. The vessel in which Captain Speke explored Lake Tanganyika was a long narrow canoe, hollowed out of the trunk of a single tree. “These vessels,” he says, “are mostly built from large timbers, growing in the district of Ugubha, on the western side of the lake. The savages fell them, lop off the branches and ends to the length required, and then, after covering the upper surface with wet mud as the tree lies upon the ground, they set fire to, and smoulder out its interior, until nothing but a case remains, which they finish by paring out with roughly constructed hatchets.” [Illustration: FIG. 51.—Clalam Stone Adze.]