140 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



true St. Acheul class, and of course antedating by a vast lapse of time the earliest 

 Egyptian civilization. From Herodotus we also learn that in the army of Xerxes, 

 (B. C. 480), the arrows of some of the Ethiopian contingents were pointed with 

 stone. 



And this meagre record comprises almost the entire sum of our present 

 knowledge concerning the employment of stone for implements on the African 

 continent. 



We can readily understand that primitive man, when completely isolated by 

 natural barriers, could have learned to utilize only such materials as his habitat 

 supplied; but on continents where his energies and movements were unrestrained 

 by impassable limits, he must have been devoid of intelligence and capacity to 

 progress if, in time, he did not become acquainted, either by migration, or bar- 

 ter, or reprisals in war, with the best substances attainable to serve his wants. 

 Thus, the savages of the Pacific Islands, when first visited by Europeans, were 

 dressed in garments made of the bark of their native trees, and armed with wea- 

 pons made of wood and stones, and ornamented with sea shells indigenous to their 

 shores. They could, unaided by visitors from other lands, never have done bet- 

 ter ; for their islands contained no metal-yielded minerals, or other materials than 

 those they had learned to use. But in Europe and America the diverse peoples, 

 restricted in freedom of range only by perpetual mutual enmities, learned the 

 arts from one another and laid regions widely separated tribute to their needs. 



The Indians of the Mississippi delta and Gulf coast, a vast tract of low alluvial 

 country destitute of rock, were when first seen by the whites by no means in the 

 simplicity of a wooden age, but were well supplied with implements of stone, includ- 

 ing hornstone from Ohio, obsidian from New Mexico, and mica mirrors from North 

 Carolina, and sported ornaments of copper from Isle Royale. During the stay of 

 Cabeca de Vaca, for six years, upon the rockless shore of eastern Texas, he made 

 several journeys far into the interior for supplies of flint for which he bartered 

 the products of the coast; and the mounds of Wisconsin and Illinois, a thousand 

 miles from the ocean, contain beads and drinking cups made of marine shells. 



There is no reason to believe that the Indians of the Mississippi Valley, who 

 built the mounds, and carved the hardest stones into pipes and images of admira- 

 ble proportions and beauty, were in point of intelligence, mechanical skill, or in 

 any other respect inferior to the iron-working savages of Central Africa; yet they 

 dwelt for centuries upon and around the mountains of bare iron ore in southeastern 

 Missouri and east Tennessee and elsewhere, surrounded with forests of fuel, with- 

 out gaining a higher knowledge of the mineral than to use it as a common stone. 

 They mined native copper with stone mawls and wooden shovels, by the aid of fire 

 and water, and used the glittering metal only as a malleable rock. The outcrops of 

 coal were their favorite haunts, but they never knew that the black diamond was 

 combustible. They camped for generations on veins of galena without discovering 

 that fire would melt it. With these minerals in the greatest abundance they had 

 no better implements than those made of stone ; and with deposits of ores the 

 most readily fused and manipulated protending from the surface all around them, 



