THE METAL ART OF ANCIENT MEXICO. 523 



Thus we see that, excepting three chisels and four bronze bells, the 

 specimens are all of pure copper, and, whether or not this pure copper 

 is native, chemical experiments have not yet been able to determine. 

 The fact that drawn wire is catalogued with the bronze specimens as 

 Mexican antiquities bids us receive them with caution ; and in this 

 connection we must remember what Sahagun and Lorenzana have told 

 us, that the Mexicans after the conquest, like the Navajos to-day, 

 utilized some of the arts of the European, and worked largely and 

 skillfully in metals. We must remember, also, that there has never 

 been in Mexico, as in Peru and Wisconsin, a discovery of an ancient 

 mine, neither a crucible nor any kind of tool by which the metal was 

 extracted from the ore, yet investigations have been going on very 

 actively in Mexico for nearly a century and a half. 



We have, then, nothing whatever, so far as archaeologic evidence 

 goes, to show that the Mexicans acquired and practiced the art of 

 smelting, refining, and alloying before the advent of the Spaniard. 



Turning from this fact to an examination of the early historic rec- 

 ords, we learn that Cortes, Gomora, and Bernal Diaz are the only 

 original authorities whose statements imply a knowledge of smelting. 

 But the honesty and accuracy of these very writers have been ques- 

 tioned. Though founded, to be sure, upon a more or less substantial 

 basis of fact, their descriptions of Mexican civilization are palpably 

 colored and idealized. The natural features of the country refute 

 many of their statements, while others are characterized by gross dis- 

 crepancy. They have been regarded, therefore, for the most part, as 

 imaginary and delusive, and, since they are the main basis upon which 

 rests the popular idea of a high civilization in ancient Mexico, that 

 civilization has been thought fictitious in some of its most essential 

 features, and in general greatly overdrawn. 



Examining first the accounts of the expeditions that touched upon 

 the shores of Yucatan and Central America prior to 1519, we find no 

 mention of any metals except pure copper and gold. But Cortes, on 

 the other hand, in one of his letters to the emperor, says that he saw 

 within the market-place of Mexico " trinkets of gold and silver, of 

 lead, bronze, copper, and tin." I can not agree with many writers in 

 thinking that the gold which Cortes saw was the product of so en- 

 lightened and difficult an art as smelting. Though gold in the ore is 

 rich and plentiful in the Mexican country, the inhabitants could not 

 have been aware of any better method of obtaining it than by sifting 

 it from river sands. Notwithstanding his numerous observations 

 of marvelously wrought gold objects in Mexico, Bernal Diaz's own 

 words should establish this fact. Montezuma, he says, informed them 

 that their gold " was obtained from the province of Zacatula, where 

 the earth which contained it was washed in wooden vessels, and the 

 gold-dust sank to the bottom." It was also to be had, he says, in 

 Tustepec, "where it was collected from the beds of rivers." Again, 



