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Rh used for engraving and drilling, emery was employed in rubbing down, and small articles were set in wood for polishing. Heliotrope, being very hard, was set in stone. The stone-workers of Xochimilco and Tenayocan enjoyed a particularly high reputation. The most gorgeous works of the lapidary's art were the mosaics, of which two are shown on Pls. I and XVIII, 1. In the first, fragments of turquoise and jet are laid in a resinous matrix on a human skull; the eyes are pyrites encircled with shell rings, and the nose is inlaid with plates of pink shell (pink shells also formed an article of tribute, see Fig. 18, e; p-118). Some of the teeth have been reset in their wrong places. The knife-handle is similarly incrusted with turquoise, malachite and shell. Masks of the gods, headpieces and ornaments were made in the same materials on wood foundations, and the masks of Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc and Tezcatlipoca were among the articles sent by Cortés to the Emperor Charles. The Tarascans were especially famed as mosaic workers, and the art extended right up into Arizona, though not in such perfection. It is thought that the turquoise itself passed in trade southwards from the deposits at Los Cerillos in New Mexico. The Toltec were reputed to have been particularly skilful lapidaries, and to have possessed peculiar powers in the way of discovering deposits of precious stones. For this purpose, so it was said, they would take up their position on some elevated spot just before dawn, and at the moment when the sun appeared above the horizon, would note any small cloud of vapour rising from the earth, a manifestation which was supposed to indicate where they might be found.

Copper was used occasionally for axe- and adze-blades, and constituted an article of tribute. Analysis has shown that it was hammered out, and the edge hardened by this means alone. Some of the blades contain a percentage of tin, but the presence of the latter metal may be regarded as purely accidental. The