104 WISCONSIN ACADEMY SCIENCES, ARTS, AND LETTERS. 



mines was brouglit to liglit by early adventurers among Indians. 

 But if excavated by them to such, an extent as we see them, and for 

 ages, how could they have been given up and even forgotten? On 

 the whole the evidence now before us tends to show that our cop- 

 per tools are the work of some pre-Indian race. The success of Mr. 

 Perkins in unearthing coppers in unlooked for numbers should 

 raise up a legion of copper-hunters. For encouraging such investi- 

 gators still more, my last words shall be regarding the greater har- 

 vest than has crowned his labors which seems to me ripe for their 

 sickles. 



Indications are not wanting that our past prizes in copper-hunts, 

 are all as nothing to what is in store for us. Pre-historic mining- 

 pits honeycomb Isle Royal all over. Along the south shore of 

 Lake Superior they are frequent for a hundred miles. They were 

 every one rich pockets. Their yield of copper must have been 

 many times enough for sheathing the British navy. What has be- 

 come of this copper? It cannot have vanished like iron in oxidiz- 

 ing rust. It must still exist, and lurk all around us. At Assouan 

 the quarries prove to a stranger that Egypt must be rich in grani- 

 tic monoliths, for there we see the rock whence they were hewn. 

 Spanish treasure-ships sunk in the Carribbean ages ago, still teach 

 divers where to ply their sub-marine machinery for richest spoils. 

 In Greece, the Styx, and other catabothra, or lost rivers — emptying 

 into subterranean abysses, suggested to the ancients streams that 

 girdled the whole under 'world. So our mining shafts sunk time 

 out of mind are a prophecy and an assurance of copper bon- 

 anzas for explorers in the future so vast as will make us utterly for- 

 get whatever has been discovered. All hail such a ressurrection of 

 the copper age. The longer it has been lost the more welcome will 

 it be when found again. 



