Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/627

Rh of the bast-fibers of certain plants, and have been preserved by "the antiseptic action of the salts of copper," the cloth having been wrapped about copper axes and nuggets prior to being placed in the mounds. It appears to be "a kind of hemp, possibly the Apocynum cannabinum formerly used by the Aztecs," or perhaps, as suggested by Colonel D. A. Robertson, of St. Paul, the fibers of Urtica gracilis. Cloth of equal fineness is still made by several of the Indian tribes, particularly by the Navajoes of New Mexico; and nearly all of the tribes are known to have had mats and even carpets, woven of various sedges or of bast-fibers. They are still made by the Chippewa Indians in northern Minnesota.

The sculptured objects taken from the mounds, even those of the human face, are generally cut in some very soft stone, or are made of clay. They are equaled in skill and design by the sculptured pipes

—From photograph of an image found in the valley of Root River, near Lanesboro, Minnesota, April, 1880. The mound from which it was taken also contained stone arrow-heads, one copper ditto, clay-burned pipes, among the remains of a large number of human skeletons. The image was evidently made of clay burned to be very hard. The back or reverse side is nearly flat. The nose is partly broken off.

and hatchets the Indians have been known to make ever since the Columbian discovery, and particularly by those made of the famous red pipestone or Catlinite of Minnesota. As illustrative of the sculpture of the mound-builders. Fig. 8 is here presented. This is from a photograph of a representation of the human face taken from a mound