EEE te Se ds dun A ie ii sh 
PRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN. 69 
peculiar shape, and formed of copper, which was found in the hard black till-clay at a 
depth of twenty feet under Ratho Bog, near Edinburgh. This is no solitary example. 
The Scottish Museum of Antiquities has other implements of pure copper ; and Sir William 
Wilde states in reference to the collections of the Royal Irish Academy, “upon careful 
examination, it has been found that thirty of the rudest, and apparently the very oldest 
celts, are of red, almost unalloyed copper;” as is also the case with some other rudely 
formed tools in the same collection. 
It was a temporary advantage, doubtless, but a real loss, to the Indian miners of Lake 
Superior that they found the native copper there ready to hand, a pure ductile metal, pro- 
bably regarded by them as only a variety of stone which —unlike its rocky matrix,—they 
could bend, or hammer into shape, without fracture. Its value as such was widely appre- 
ciated. The copper tools, every where retaining the specs, or larger crystals of silver, 
characteristic of the Lake Superior veins, tell of the diffusion of the metal from that single 
source throughout all the vast regions watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries, and 
eastward by lake and river to the gulf of the St. Lawrence and the mouth of the Hudson. 
There was a time when this traffic must have been systematically carried on ; when 
the ancient miners of Lake Superior worked its rich coppers veins with industrious zeal ; 
and when, probably as part of the same aggressive energy, the valley of the Ohio was 
filling with a settled population ; its great earthworks were in process of construction, and a 
native race entered on a course that gave promise of social progress. But, from whatever 
cause, the work of the old miners was abruptly terminated ; * the race of the Mounds vanished 
from the scenes of their ingenious toil ; and rudest barbarism resumed its away over the whole 
northern continent. The same Aryan race that, before the dawn of history; before the 
Sanskrit-speaking people of India, or the Zends of Persia, entered on their southern homes: 
spoke in its own cradle-land, on the high plateau of Central Asia, the mother tongue of 
Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic, and German, at length broke up, and went forth on its long 
wanderings. It crossed the old continent, and in successive detachments, wave after 
wave, of Celts, Romans, Greeks, Slaves, and Teutons, broke in upon the barbarism of 
prehistoric Europe ; displaced the older races, Allophylian, Neolithic, Iberian, Finnic, or by 
whatever other name we may find it convenient to designate them; but not without a 
certain amount of intermingling of the old blood with that of the intruders. The sparsely 
settled continent gradually filled up. Forests were cleared, swamps drained, rivers con- 
fined by artificial banks and levées to their channels; and there grew up in their new home 
the Celtic, Classic, Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, with all the richly varied culture and 
civilization which they represent. Agriculture, the special characteristic of the whole 
Aryan race, flourished. They brought with them the cereals from their ancestral home ; 
and, with plenty, the favoured race multiplied, till at length it has grown straitened within 
the bounds of the continent which it had made its own. 
With the close of the 15th century one great cycle, that of Europe’s mediæval era, 
came toanend; andthen we trace the first beginnings of that fresh scattering of the Aryan 
clan, and its new western movement across the Ocean. It seems to me in a very striking 
manner once more to repeat itself under our own eyes, as we look abroad on the millions 
crowding in from Europe, hewing down the forests, filling up the waste prairies, and dis- 

* Prehistoric Man, 3rd ed. vol. i, pp. 203-228, 
