Copper Implements. 135 



is of recent casting, for it is evident that these delicate marks 

 would be the first to be corroded by the tooth of time. 



I make a short extract from a paper entitled " The Ancient 

 Men of the Great Lakes," read by Henry Gilman at the Detroit 

 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science. Mr. Grilman is a close observer, and an accomplished 

 archaeologist, and has made the ancient mines of Lake Superior 

 a specialty. He says : " I cannot close, however, without express- 

 ing my wondering admiration of a relic, which, taken in connec- 

 tion with our former discoveries, affords some of the most import- 

 ant evidences of the character of the ancient miners, the nature 

 of their work, and the richness of the mineral field selected for 

 their labors, at Isle Eoyale. On cleaning out of the pit the ac- 

 cumulated debris, this mass was found at the bottom, at the depth 

 of sixteen and one-half feet. It is of a crescent-like shape and 

 weighs nearly three tons, or exactly 5,720 pounds. Such a huge 

 mass was evidently beyond the ability of those ancient men to 

 remove. They could only deal with it as best they knew how. 

 And as to their mode of procedure, the surroundings in the pit, 

 and the corrugated surface of the mass itself, bear ample testi- 

 mony. The large quantities of ashes and charcoal lying round it 

 show that the action of fire had been brought to bear on it. A 

 great number of the stone hammers, or mauls, were also found 

 near by, many of them fractured from use. With these the sur- 

 face of the mass had evidently been beaten up into projecting 

 ridges and broken off. The entire upper face and sides of the 

 relic present repeated instances of this ; the depressions, several 

 inches deep, and the intervening elevations with their fractured 

 summits covering every foot of the exposed superficies. How 

 much of the original mass was removed in the manner described, 

 it is of course impossible to say. But from appearances, in all 

 probability it had at least been one third larger. Innumerable 

 fragments of copper cJnp>s lay strewn on all sides, and even the 

 scales of fish, evidently the remnants of the meals of the miners, 

 were recovered from the pit." 



Mr. Oilman was asked if there were in or about any of these 

 ancient mines any indications of the copper having been melted. 

 He replied : "Not the least." And now, were not these innumer- 



