Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/215

Rh had never been interfered with, until they came within the range of European discovery.

But in other parts of North, and South America, such interference had already taken place before the time of Columbus. The native copper of North America had been largely used by the race known to us as the "Mound Builders," who have left as memorials of their existence the enormous mounds and fortifications of the Mississippi Valley. They do not seem to have understood the art of melting copper, or even of forging it hot, but to have treated it as a kind of malleable stone, which they got in pieces out of the ground, or knocked off from the great natural blocks, and hammered into knives, chisels, axes, and ornaments. The use of native copper was by no means confined to the Mound Builders, for the European explorers found it in use for knives, ice-chisels, ornaments, etc., in the northern part of the Continent, especially among the Esquimaux and the Canadian Indians. The copper which Captain Cook found in abundance among the Indians of Prince William's Sound, was no doubt native. The iron used for arrow-heads by the Indians at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata was no doubt meteoric. This has been found in use among the Esquimaux. There is a harpoon-point of walrus tusk in the British Museum, headed with a blade of meteoric iron, and a knife, also of tusk, which is edged by fixing in a row of chips of meteoric iron along a groove. But these instruments do not appear old; they are just like those in which the Esquimaux at present mount morsels of European iron, and there is no evidence that they used their native meteoric iron until their intercourse with Europeans in modern times had taught them the nature and use of the metal. It is indeed very strange that there should be no traces found among them of knowledge of metal-work, and of other arts which one would expect a race so receptive of foreign knowledge to have got from contact with the Northmen, in the tenth and following