82 PICTURE-WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. 
2 miles below the mouth of Machias river. The rock or ledge is about 
50 feet long from east to west and about fifteen feet in width, nearly 
horizontal for two-thirds its length, from the bank or western end at 
high water, thence inclining at an angle of 15° to low-water mark. Its 
southern face is inclined about 46°. The formation is schistose slate, 
having a transverse vein of trap dike extending nearly across its sec- 
tion. Nearly the entire ledge is of blue black color, very dense and 
hard except at the upper or western end, where the periodical forma- 
tion of ice has scaled off thin layers of surface and destroyed many 
figures which are remembered by persons now living. The ebb and 
flow of tides, the abrasion of moving beach stones or pebble wash and 
of ice-worn bowlders, have also effaced many figures along the southern 
side, until now but one or two indentations are discernible. Visitors, in 
seeking to remove some portion of the rock as a curiosity or in striving 
to perpetuate their initials, have obscured several of the most interest- 
ing, and until recently the best defined figures. It was also evident to 
the present writer, who carefully examined the rock in 1888, that it lay 
much deeper in the water than once had been the case. At the lowest 
tides there were markings seen still lower, which could not readily have 
been made if that part of the surface had not been continuously ex- 
posed. The depression of a rock of such great size, which was so 
gradual that it had not been observed by the inhabitants of the neigh- 
boring settlement, is an evidence of the antiquity of the peckings. 
The intaglio carving of all the figures was apparently made by 
repeated blows of a pointed instrument—doubtless of hard stone; not 
held as a chisel, but working by a repetition of hammerings or peck- 
ings. The deepest now seen is about three-eighths of an inch. 
The amount of patient labor bestowed upon these figures must have 
been great, considering the hardness of the rock and the rude implement 
with which they were wrought. 
There is no extrinsic evidence of their age. The place was known 
to traders early in the seventeenth century, and much earlier was 
visited by Basque fishermen, and perhaps by the unfortunate Cortereals 
in 1500 and 1503. The descendants of the Mechises Indians, a tribal 
branch of the Abnaki, who once occupied the territory between the St. 
Croix and Narraguagus rivers, when questioned many years ago, would 
reply in substance that ‘all their old men knew of them,” either by 
having seen them or by traditions handed down through many genera- 
tions. 
Several years ago Mr. H. R. Taylor, of Machias, who made the orig- 
inal sketch in 1868 and kindly furnished it to the Bureau of Ethnology, 
applied to a resident Indian there (Peter Benoit, then nearly 80 
years old) for assistance in deciphering the characters. He gave little 
information, but pointed out that the figures must not all be read “ from 
one side only,” thus, the one near the center of the sketch, which seen 
from the south was without significance became from the opposite 
pe 
