NOTES ON ABORIGINAL RELICS KNOWN AS PLUMMETS. 649 
performance of some religious ceremony. This, like the preceding 
supposition, is only a possibility, there being no evidence what- 
ever from which we are warranted in deriving such an inference. 
5th. They might have been worn as a personal ornament. If 
they were used for this purpose, it would seem to me that imple- 
ments worked out of iron ore, with the amount of labor which 
was bestowed on the Quincy specimens, would be ornamented 
with lines or figures. Their very plainness would seem to indicate 
the practical use for which they were intended. Besides, the 
weight of those made of iron ore would, at least, in the estimation 
of a white man, render them inconvenient personal ornaments. 
6th. They might have been, and probably were, used for 
plummets. Their shape and the groove at the small end suggest 
at once, to the eye of a civilized man, that they were used in the 
first instance for obtaining a perpendicular line, and then as a 
level by drawing a horizontal line, at right angles with the first. 
This would easily be accomplished by the use of a wooden or 
other square. It has been suggested, that from the nature of the 
aboriginal ruins throughout the United States, the primitive 
people who made these implements would have had no use for 
plummets but it seems to me that the fact that this implement 
can also be used as a level, has escaped attention. Indeed the 
plummet, suspended to an upright fastened to a horizontal bar, is 
-used among us asa level. That the mound builders had the abil- 
ity to make the square above suggested, we know from the math- 
ematical accuracy of squares and circular enclosures of earth 
found everywhere in the Mississippi Valley. Whatever might 
have been their use, their great antiquity will not be questioned. 
The Brown County, Woodbridge and Table Mountain specimens 
indicate that they rank among the very oldest relics of man found 
upon this continent, while from that found in the mound at Mari- 
etta, we see that they were at least not unknown to the mound 
builders, and, if Schooleraft is right, the Penacook specimen 
shows it to have been used by the modern Indian. 
[EDITORIA 
shown by the hundreds of varieties of the pear itself. Local archæologists here in 
general consider them as “ sinkers,” principally from their shape and from : 
they are more often found along the seashore than in the interior, though no unfre- 
