Quite lately, too, we have learned something of the early races of man in Colorado. Many of the caves in that country have been altered and made more like regular houses, and some appear even to have been cut out of the rock entirely by human hands; and in the plains there are ruins of large cities. Though still in the stone age, for all the weapons yet found among these ruins are of stone, the Colorado people were more civilized than the stone-age people of the Vezère caverns, because they had begun to build and knew how to make pottery. It is strange, too, that the present natives of Colorado are not so civilized as the early people, and if they have descended from them they have not improved, but rather the contrary. There are other caverns in various parts of the world containing these curious relics of races long since passed away, but some of the principal have been mentioned, enough perhaps to interest you and show you that men were living in Europe together with the large animals of the Tertiary period, and that they had made very little progress in the arts and manufactures, and had not even begun to build the roughest houses. In many parts of the world even now there are savages nearly as uncivilized as the cave-dwellers of Europe were then. When Captain Cook visited New Zealand, more than a hundred years ago, the natives there had nothing but stone and bone tools, very like those found in the European caverns, and the inhabitants of some of the islands in the Pacific Ocean still use stone axes and hammers and bone needles.[25] Captain Moresby, too, who made a voyage to the south-east coast of New Guinea a few years ago, tells us that the natives have beautiful stone axes, but they were so ignorant of the use of iron that they refused to give him one of their stone axes for a new iron hatchet which he offered them. No doubt the stone weapon cost a great deal of labour and patience to make, and perhaps the iron one was made by machinery in a few minutes, and was really more useful, but the native had proved his own axe and knew nothing of the iron one, so that it is no wonder that he refused it. But what a history these two axes tell—the stone and the iron! The stone shows us man in his childhood, and the iron man in his manhood, and what an immensely long time there is between the two. How much thought, and trial and failure, and patience and industry, were spent by mankind before the stone axe grew into the iron!