204 THE STONE AGE — PAST AND PRESENT. 



iron lias left nothing of the ancient state of things, except a few 

 remnants of interest to ethnologists and antiquaries, but of no 

 practical importance to the world at large. 



In the first place, there are parts of the world whose inha- 

 bitants, when they were discovered in modern times by more 

 advanced races, were found not possessed of metals, but using 

 stone, shell, bone, split canes, and so forth, for purposes in 

 making tools and weapons to which we apply metals. Now as 

 we have no e^^deuce that the inhabitants of Australia, the 

 South Sea Islands, and a considerable part of North and South 

 America, had ever been possessed of metals, it seems reason- 

 able to consider these districts as countries where original 

 Stone Age conditions had never been interfered with, until 

 they came within the range of European discovery. 



But in other parts of North and South America, such inter- 

 ference had already taken place before the time of Columbus. 

 The native copper of North America had been largely used by 

 the race known to us as the " Mound Builders," who have left 

 as memorials of their existence the enormous mounds and 

 fortifications of the Mississippi Valley.^ 1'bey do not seem to 

 have understood the art of melting copper, or even of forging 

 it hot, but to have treated it as a kind of malleable stone, 

 which they got in pieces out of the ground, or knocked off 

 from the great natural blocks, and hammered into knives, 

 chisels, axes, and ornaments. The use of native copper was 

 by no means confined to the Mound Builders, for the European 

 explorers found it in use for knives, ice-chisels, ornaments, 

 etc., in the northern part of the continent, especially among 

 the Esquimaux and the Canadian Indians.^ The copper which 

 Captain Cook found in abundance among the Indians of Prince 

 William's Sound, was no doubt native.^ Even meteoric iron 

 has been found in use among the Esquimaux. There is a 

 harpoon-point of wah'us tusk in the British Museum, headed 



' See Squier & Davis, etc. 



" Squier, Abor. Mon. of State of N. Y., Smithsonian Contr. ; Washington, 

 1851, pp. 176-7. Sir J. Richardson, ' The Polar Eegions ; ' Edinburgh, 1861* 

 p. 308. Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 230. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 18. 



^ Cook, Thii-d Voy., vol. ii. p. 380. 



