Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/538

522 of Sahagun's writing, about 1550." These metal-smiths were evidently bound to secrecy in their art, for, in the Viceroy Mendoza's time, Lorenzana says that one of these workmen was imprisoned for counterfeiting the Spanish coins, and, though he was promised pardon if he would reveal the workshops of his people, his persistent silence caused him to be put to death.

We find that chisels also are enumerated by Sahagun in the above quotation, and there is no reason why we can not ascribe the three bronze chisels that we have to the native metal-smiths to whom he refers. We have, at any rate, no evidence, historic or archæologic, by which we might reasonably consider them as belonging to the period before the conquest. Two of these bronze chisels are in the National Museum at Washington, but, unfortunately for our present investigation, their origin is unknown, and no analysis of them has been made to determine the relative percentage of copper and tin.

The remaining bronze chisel is in the Museum of Mexico, and is described and figured in the annals of that institution, Vol. I, page 117. It should be noted that its form is very unlike either of the two to which we have above referred, and that it has a percentage of 97·87 parts of copper and 2·13 of tin, which is precisely the same as that of a bronze chisel found by Mr. J. H. Blake in Peru and described in Wilson's "Prehistoric Man," Vol. I, page 293. We know not where, when, or how it was found, and if we doubt that it was fashioned by the native metal-smiths who worked after the advent of the Spaniards, we might suppose it to have wandered thus far from its Peruvian home, for greater distances, we know, did the copper of Lake Superior travel in aboriginal barter.

But besides these there have also been found many other chisels, and these as far as we know are all of copper. Dupaix describes several which were plowed up in the neighborhood of the village of Antequera in Oaxaca. They are composed, he says, of red copper which we remember his editor, Lenoir, called native. Dr. Philipp Valentini refers to another which, he says, is similar in form and composition to those described by Dupaix. This was plowed up by Señor Andrez Axnar Perez on his plantation near the river Zompan in Tabasco, at a depth of nearly twelve inches. Unfortunately, none of Dupaix's chisels can now be found, but the cut he gives shows them to have been of the simplest form, and not unlike those in use by our carpenters to-day. These, and that of Señor Perez, are uniform in shape and composition, while each of the three of bronze presents a strikingly odd and distinct type. An analysis of their composition would doubtless show also a varying percentage of copper and tin, and we feel tempted, under the circumstances, to regard those of pure copper, which are uniform, as indigenous, and the bronze, which are odd, as importations from South America, or else the product of post-Columbian skill.