662 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



valuable information can be diffused throughout the land ; and 

 not the least of the benefit which will come from such work 

 will be the moral effect of intelligent study and the pleasure and 

 satisfaction of working out understandingly some of the many 

 perplexing problems of e very-day living. 



PREHISTORIC JASPER MINES IN THE LEHIGH HILLS. 



BY H. C. MERCER. 



BEGINNING at Durham, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and 

 following the trend of the Lehigh hills toward the Schuylkill 

 near Reading, and generally in close connection with veins of he- 

 matite, occurs a series of outcrops of the hard homogeneous rock 

 known as jasper. This many-colored stone with its smooth, con- 

 choidal fracture stood somewhat in the same relation to the North 

 American Indian that iron stands to us. With it he fashioned his 

 best spears, perforators, knives, arrowheads, and scrapers. No less 

 diligently did he seek for it than does the man of the nineteenth 

 century search for that great lever of his power and progress, 

 iron ; and no less persistently did he quarry it, shape it to his 

 needs, and transport it to great distances. 



So Indians in the West had been known to quarry jasper at 

 the now famous " Flint Ridge," in Ohio ; novaculite at their great 

 quarries in Garland County, Arkansas ; jasper, or hornstone, again 

 in the Indian Territory ; quartzite at Piney Branch, in the Dis- 

 trict of Columbia ; obsidian, or volcanic glass, in the Yellowstone 

 Park and Mexico, and other workable stones at other places. But 

 whence the jasper supply came from east of the Alleghanies has 

 long remained a mystery. Even the State geological surveys did 

 not seem to recognize the existence of jasper in the eastern Le- 

 high hills ; so that the recent series of discoveries, by expeditions 

 in the interest of the University of Pennsylvania, have thrown 

 an unexpected light upon the story of ancient man in the Dela- 

 ware Valley. 



The thanks of the university are due to Mr. Charles Laubach, 

 of Durham, who first introduced the explorers, in 1891, to the 

 aboriginal jasper quarry on Rattlesnake Hill, at Durham, Bucks 

 County, Pennsylvania, and to Mr. A. F. Berlin, of Allentown, who, 

 by a series of valuable clews, greatly furthered the work of subse- 

 quent research. 



How did the Indian, armed only with tools of wood, bone, 

 stone, or beaten native copper, make the excavations, sometimes 

 quite twenty feet in depth and one hundred in diameter ? Did he 

 use pickaxes made of deer antlers, as did the ancient flint-workers 



