HOLMES ANNIVERSARY VOLUME 



Thousand in Asia Minor — all these show what the Indian could have 

 accomplished had the conditions of existence been different. If he 

 had been of an inventive or mechanical turn of mind, he would have 

 built up in this country a great nation. 



But his adverse surroundings were too great for him to overcome. 

 He was compelled to depend on wild game for his meat. Unable to 

 make any impression on the great forests, which would grow faster 

 than he could clear them away, he must, as a rule, exist in small 

 communities. He must have around him a large expanse of wilderness 

 to insure a supply of game; consequently he must have no neighbors. 

 With only stone for making implements or weapons, he must exert 

 the maximum of effort to secure the minimum of result. Throughout 

 his life he was the target for disease, warfare, cold, scarcity of food, 

 all of which taxed his vitality to the utmost. 



Without domestic animals which can be bred in sufficient numbers 

 to meet all demands for food and for labor; without knowledge of 

 working in iron to the extent that it can be manufactured into all 

 needed tools, implements, and utensils; without sedentary communi- 

 ties in which there can be a division of labor such that each man can 

 put all his energies into that for which he is best fitted ; and without a 

 system of transportation by which separated communities can ex- 

 change their surplus products: without these aids no people can ever 

 pass very far beyond the dividing line between savagery and bar- 

 barism. By reason of his geological environment the Indian could not 

 overcome these handicaps. 



Restricted as he was to indifferent materials, the Indian yet ac- 

 complished much with the little he had. Along the coasts and the 

 rivers, with his spears and nets he became an expert fisherman. In 

 the islands of Alaska and British Columbia he made canoes as sea- 

 worthy as the products of our best boat-yards. In Michigan he mined 

 copper and wrought it into all manner of useful and ornamental 

 shapes. In northern United States and southern Canada he displayed 

 no mean degree of artistic and mechanical skill in the fabrication of 

 axes and tomahawks from granite, syenite, and diorite, as well as in 

 the shaping of ornaments and symbols from slate and harder stone. 

 Wherever the vast flint deposits in the lower Carboniferous strata of 

 the Mississippi valley were at all accessible to him, he quarried ex- 

 tensively and converted the intractable stone into myriad patterns 

 of knives, arrowpoints, and spearheads, many of them having beautiful 

 outlines and delicate finish. With only sharpened bones for needles, 

 he made garments not only serviceable but neat-fitting and often 

 very handsome. In southern Illinois he made of chert nodules ex- 



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