218 THE BRONZE AXE. 



proceeded to hammer himself various weapons and 

 implements without delay. Amongst others, he produced 

 for himself very neat spear-heads, with sockets adapted 

 for the reception of a shaft, made by hammering out the 

 base flat, and then turning over the edges so as to enclose 

 the wood between them, like a modern hoe-handle. In 

 Wisconsin alone more than a hundred of such copper 

 axes, spear-heads, and knives have been unearthed by 

 antiquaries and duly recorded. 



All these weapons, however, are simply hammered, not 

 cast or melted. The Red Indian hadn't yet reached the 

 stage of making a mould when De Champlain and his 

 voyageurs came down upon Canada and interrupted this 

 interesting experiment in industrial development by 

 springing the seventeenth century upon the unsophisti- 

 cated red man at one fell blow, with all its inherited 

 wealth of European science. Nevertheless, the Indians 

 must have known that fire melted copper ; for the heat 

 of the altars was great enough, say Squier and Davis, to 

 fuse the implements and ornaments laid upon them 

 in sacrificial rites ; and so the fact of its fusibility 

 could hardly have escaped them. A people who had 

 advanced so far on the road towards the invention of 

 casting could hardly have been prevented from taking 

 the final step, save by the sudden intervention of some 

 social cataclysm like the European invasion of Eastern 

 America. And how awful a calamity that was for 

 the Indians themselves we at this day can hardly even 

 realize. 



In some similar way, no doubt, the Asiatic people who 

 first invented bronze must have learned the fact qf the 



