102 WISCONSIN ACADEMY SCIENCES, ARTS, AND LETTERS. 



are scattered far and wide. Five of them are in the Central Park 

 museum, others in the Metropolitan in New York, ethers I think 

 have enriched the Smithsonian. A further question which must 

 occur to every investigator, is, where were these implements ob- 

 tained by those from whom Mr. Perkins obtained them? On this 

 point my information is more scanty than it would be were not 

 Mr. Perkins now in Europe, and than it will be on his return. 

 Large numbers of the tools were turned up in plowing or hoeing. 

 Others at greater depth in digging foundations of houses or sink- 

 ing wells. Not a few have come to light in burial mounds close 

 by skeletons. In one such mound at Prairie du Chien an axe weigh- 

 ing two and seven-sixteenths pounds and eight inches long was 

 discovered lying on a large flint spade, fourteen feet below the top 

 of the mound, and seven feet below the level of the earth around,, 

 and among human bones. Another axe, wath other coppers, was 

 taken from a similar mound in Barron county. The only socket 

 spear-head which shows its rivet still in its place, was found on a 

 knoll in plowed land by James Driscoll in May, 1874, at Lake Five, 

 Waukesha county. One knife was dug out of a mound by a dog 

 W'hile hunting, in 1860, in Troy, Waukesha county. One chisel 

 was met with ten feet below the surface in cutting a road through 

 a bluff at Cedarburg, Ozaukee county, in 1871. One of the most 

 remarkable articles, a sort of copper pike, was dug up three feet 

 under ground on the bank of Pike Lake, Hartford, Washington 

 county, by Samuel Mowry in 1885. One massive celt, at first 

 turned up in Merton, Waukesha coant}^ a pedlar had preserved 

 for twenty years. Several knives and other implements found near 

 lakes and rivers appear to have been washed out of their banks. A 

 lance-head found at Rubicon, Dodge county, in 1869, has a lump 

 or stud of silver on one side of it. 



But we cannot fail to ask, " who made these copper instruments? 

 was it Indians or some pre-Iudian race?" It has been argued that 

 they are of pre-Indian origin because the skeletons with which 

 they are discovered in burial mounds are not of the Indian type, 

 but of a very different cranial development. Again, as the mounds, 

 multitudinous and often of vast size, are beyond Indian industry^ 

 so the tools seem beyond Indian ingenuity. Most of them indeed, 

 are hammered, and so show copper used rather as a mineral than as 

 a metal. Others of the coppers betray no marks of hammering, no 



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