Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/539

Rh Thus we see that, excepting three chisels and four bronze bells, the specimens are all of pure copper, and, whether or not this pure copper is native, chemical experiments have not yet been able to determine. The fact that drawn wire is catalogued with the bronze specimens as Mexican antiquities bids us receive them with caution; and in this connection we must remember what Sahagun and Lorenzana have told us, that the Mexicans after the conquest, like the Navajos to-day, utilized some of the arts of the European, and worked largely and skillfully in metals. We must remember, also, that there has never been in Mexico, as in Peru and Wisconsin, a discovery of an ancient mine, neither a crucible nor any kind of tool by which the metal was extracted from the ore, yet investigations have been going on very actively in Mexico for nearly a century and a half.

We have, then, nothing whatever, so far as archæologic evidence goes, to show that the Mexicans acquired and practiced the art of smelting, refining, and alloying before the advent of the Spaniard.

Turning from this fact to an examination of the early historic records, we learn that Cortes, Gomora, and Bernal Diaz are the only original authorities whose statements imply a knowledge of smelting. But the honesty and accuracy of these very writers have been questioned. Though founded, to be sure, upon a more or less substantial basis of fact, their descriptions of Mexican civilization are palpably colored and idealized. The natural features of the country refute many of their statements, while others are characterized by gross discrepancy. They have been regarded, therefore, for the most part, as imaginary and delusive, and, since they are the main basis upon which rests the popular idea of a high civilization in ancient Mexico, that civilization has been thought fictitious in some of its most essential features, and in general greatly overdrawn.

Examining first the accounts of the expeditions that touched upon the shores of Yucatan and Central America prior to 1519, we find no mention of any metals except pure copper and gold. But Cortes, on the other hand, in one of his letters to the emperor, says that he saw within the market-place of Mexico "trinkets of gold and silver, of lead, bronze, copper, and tin." I can not agree with many writers in thinking that the gold which Cortes saw was the product of so enlightened and difficult an art as smelting. Though gold in the ore is rich and plentiful in the Mexican country, the inhabitants could not have been aware of any better method of obtaining it than by sifting it from river sands. Notwithstanding his numerous observations of marvelously wrought gold objects in Mexico, Bernal Diaz's own words should establish this fact. Montezuma, he says, informed them that their gold "was obtained from the province of Zacatula, where the earth which contained it was washed in wooden vessels, and the gold-dust sank to the bottom." It was also to be had, he says, in Tustepec, "where it was collected from the beds of rivers." Again,