760 PICTURE-WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. 
reported to bear a close resemblance to Chinese. This resemblance 
seemed not to be extraordinary when if was ascertained that the plate 
had been engraved by the village blacksmith, copied trom the lid of a 
Chinese tea-chest. 
The following recent notice of a case of alleged fraud is quoted from 
Science, Vol. IIL, No. 58, March 14, 1884, page 334: 
Dr. N. Roe Bradner exhibited [at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, 
Pennsylvania] an inscribed stone found inside a skull taken from one of the ancient 
mounds at Newark, Ohio, in 1865. An exploration of the region had been under- 
taken, in consequence of the finding of stones bearing markings somewhat resemb- 
ling Hebrew letters, in the hope of finding other specimens of a like character. 
The exploration was supposed to have been entirely unproductive of such objects 
until Dr. Bradner had found the engraved stone, now exhibited, in a skull which 
had been given to him. 
This was supplemented by an editorial note in No. 62 of the same 
publication, page 467, as follows: 
A correspondent from Newark, Ohio, warns us that any inscribed stones said to 
originate from that locality may be looked upon as spurious. Years ago certain 
parties in that place made a business of manufacturing and burying inscribed 
stones and other objects in the autumn, and exhuming them the following spring in 
the presence of innocent witnesses. Some of the parties to these frauds afterwards 
contessed to them; and no such objects, except such as were spurious, have ever 
been known from that region. 
The correspondent of Science probably remembered the operations of > 
David Wyrick, of Newark, who, to prove his theory that the Hebrews 
were the mound-builders, discovered in 1860 a tablet bearing on one 
side a truculent “likeness” of Moses with his name in Hebrew, and on 
the other a Hebrew abridgment of the ten commandments. A Hebrew 
bible afterwards found in Mr. Wyrick’s private room threw some light 
on the inscribed characters. 
A grooved stone ax or maul, first described by the late Dr. John 
Evans, of Pemberton, New Jersey, was reproduced by Dr. Wilson (a). 
Several characters are cut in the groove and on the blade. They are 
neither Runic, Scandinavian, nor Anglo-Saxon. It was found near 
Pemberton, New Jersey, prior to 1859. Dr. EK. H. Davis, who saw the 
stone, does not regard the inscription as ancient. The characters had 
been retouched before he saw them. 
A grooved stone ax or maul, sent to Col. Whittlesey in 1874, from 
Butler county, Ohio, about the size of the Pemberton ax, was covered 
with English letters so fresh as to deceive no one versed in antiquities. 
The purport of this inscription is that in 1689 Capt. H. Argill passed 
there and secreted two hundred bags of gold near a spring. 
It was claimed that an inscribed stone had been plowed up on the 
2astern Shore of Grand Traverse bay, Michigan, and an imperfect cast 
of it was among the collections of the state of Michigan at the Centen- 
nial Exhibition. The original is or was in the cabinet of the Kent 
county Institute, Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is imperfectly exe- 
