1066 The American Naturalist. [December, 
Indians Mining Lead.—Mr. Benjamin Pursell, of Kintnersville, 
Bucks County, Pa., told me in September, 1891, as a well known story 
in the Delaware Valley, that Indians in the last century had shown 
members of the Ridge family, then living on Ridge’s Island, lead ore 
in situ, at a spot never since discovered in the neighboring hills. 
More definite still is the lead story of New Galena, Bucks County, 
Pa., at third hand. Somewhere in the middle of the century Elijah 
and Abraham Campbell, of Plumstead, told John M. Proctor, now of 
Blooming Glen, who wrote me in December, 1891, that straggling 
Indians coming to hunt along the north branch of the Neshaminy, 
between 1790 and 1808, had often taken them as boys to a place near 
the mouth of the * Hartyhickon" (now the property of Mr. Arthur 
Chapman). "There they disappeared in the woods to return with their 
arms full of lead, with which they made bullets. 
I took these for loeal tales till I was surprised to hear J. M. Kessler, 
at Hummel's Wharf, Snyder County, Pa., tell me the same story, 
while pointing to the hills across the Susquehanna as its scene. But I 
came nearest of all tothe legend when Reuben Anders, of Little Wap- 
walopen, Luzerne County, Pa., gave me it first hand. He had seen 
the Indian who had spent the night with his grandfather and offered 
to show him a mineral wonder on a hill called Councilkopf. Though 
the latter was afraid to follow the red man alone, one Harman had 
gone hunting with two others, who when bullets had given out had 
gone into the woods and returned with loads of lead. If untrue,it is 
hard to see why this lead story has so seized the popular mind. But 
when we realize, as I am informed, that lead rarely, if ever, occurs pure 
in nature, but as galena, which, if mixed with lumps of limestone, 
requires about 1200 degrees (Centigrade) of heat to smelt by drying 
out the earbonie acid and removing the sulphur, it is to be doubted 
whether, given the galena, any such offhand bullet-making in the 
woods could ever have taken place.? 
Squier and Davis found galena ornaments in ancient Ohio tumuli. 
Mr. Clarence B. Moore showed me a lump excavated by him from a 
St. John's River (Florida) mound, and modern Sioux ornament their 
catlinite pipes with lead, but no digging has yet proved that mound 
"Some specimens of galena, recently obtained through Mr. Alfred Paschall, 
from the prospective mine now working in the bed of the North Branch of the 
Neshaminy, on the farm of Henry Funk (New Britain Township, Bucks County, 
Pa.), would not melt in a red-hot erucible, but splintered into fine fragments, as 
did other fragments when held directly in the bellows fire. 
