PREHISTORIC ART. 461 



from Mexico (see illustration), the labrets/ ear ornameuts, and tubes,- wliich are 

 even more highly polished, though no portion of the latter is thicker than one- 

 thirty-second of an inch. An obsidian cojofce head^ in the Blake collection in the 

 United States National Museum is a beautiful ornauu-ut, highly polished, and bored 

 throughout the lower part. The spear points and hoes from East St. Louis and 

 other parts of Missouri and Illinois, and beautiful sacrilicial knives — notably the 

 immense knife,^ 18 inches in length, in the Blake collection of the United States 

 Natuiual Museum, and the one in the Ethnological Museum at the Trocadero in 

 Paris — show the greatest skill in chii>ping. 



Many of the aboriginal stone objects found in North America and elsewhere are 

 marvels of lapidarian skill in chipping, drilling, grinding, and jiolishing. Few lap- 

 idaries could duplicate the arrow points of obsidian from New Mexico, or those of 

 jasper, agate, agatized wood, and other minerals found along the Willamette River, 

 Oregon. No lapidary could drill a hard stone object truer than some of the banner 

 stoues,^ tubes, and other objects made of quartz, greenstone, and granite that 

 have been found in North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, or make anything 

 more graceful in form and general outline than are some of the quartz discoidal 

 stones'' found m these same States. These latter objects are often 4 to 6 inches, 

 antl occasionally 7 inches, in diameter, ground in the center until they are of the 

 thinness of paper and almost transparent, and the great regularity of the two sides 

 would almost suggest that they had l)een turned in tbe lathe. This may have been 

 accomplished by mounting a log in the side of a tree so that it would revolve, and 

 ceineuting the stones with pitch to the end of the log, as a lapidary would do to-day 

 at Obersteiu, Germany, or by allowing the shalt of the lathe to protrude through 

 the side of the log, and cementing the stone to be turned on this. The Egyptian 

 wood turner at work in the Rue de Caire, at the World's Fair, Paris, 1889, might, 

 with his lathe, polish a large ornament of jade or jadeite, like the masks, idols, tab- 

 lets, and other objects found in Mexico and Central America, or the jade knives from 

 Alaska, in the United States National Museum. 



Jadeite masls. — Eeturning to the discussion of lapidary art as mani- 

 lested ill the working of hard stone, plate 41 shows examples of differ- 

 ent materials, form, uses, and localities, though all from Mexico or 

 Central America; some specimens are obsidian, and no distinction is 

 maintained as to the material of the others. 



Fig. Ill is a mask of jadeite from an Aztec (?) grave in Mexico. It 

 represents a crying baby. It belougs to Mr. Charles Storrs, of Brooklyn, 

 and was exhibited at the meeting of the American Association for the 

 Advancement of Science in 1879, by Mrs. Ermiunie A. Smith. It is 

 reported as having a specific gravity of 3.3; which, with its hardness, 

 determines it to be jadeite. Remarking upon its art, we first see hoM- it 

 has been wrought by drilling and other methods of abrasion into, not 

 simply a representation of the human face, but that it has its peculiar 

 expression. The eyes are closed, the brows are drawn down, the nose 

 and upper lip are drawn up, deep furrows are in the cheeks under the 

 eyes and by the side of the nose, the contour is regular, the profile is cor- 

 rect and true, and besides all this, every portion of the face has been not 

 only smoothed, but finely polished, the depths and sides of the furrows 

 and around the eyes equally well with that of the prominent parts like 

 the cheeks and forehead. Suggestions are made as to how some of this 



• See fig. 117. » See fig. 116. s gee figs. 100-104. 



^Seefig. 118. ■• Fee fig. 88. ' ''See fig. 110. 



