48 ABORIGINAL MONUMENTS
to believe that the race of the mounds had the slightest acquaintance with its uses.*
It is hardly to be supposed that the silver and copper found in the mounds, were reduced from the ores of these metals. On the contrary, it is nearly certain that they were obtained native from primitive deposits. Indeed, fragments of unwrought native copper have occasionally been discovered, of considerable size; one of these, from which portions had evidently been cut, weighing twenty- three pounds, was found, a few years since, near Chillicothe. Both metals appear to have been worked in a cold state, and display the lamination of surface resulting from such a process. This is somewhat remarkable, as the fires upon
- It is unnecessary to remark that all accounts of the discovery of iron in
the mounds, or under such circumstances as to imply a date prior to the Dis- covery, are sufficiently vague and unsatisfactory. The fragment of an iron wedge, found in a rock near Salem, Washington county, Ohio, and which has been alluded to by several writers upon American antiquities, does not probably possess an antiquity of more than fifty years. It is now in the possession of Dr. S. P. Hildreth, of Marietta, and its history, stripped of all that is not well- authenticated, is simply that it was found fastened in a cleft of a rock, and no ‘one could tell how it came there! The only authority for the discovery of iron in the mounds, is the author of the paper on American antiquities, in the first volume of the Archzologia Americana, who states that, ina mound at Circle- ville, Ohio, was found amongst other articles “a plate of iron which had be- come an oxyde, but before it was distributed by the spade resembled a plate of cast iron.” (Arch@ol. Am. Vol.i.,p. 178.) It is obviously no easy matter to detect iron when fully oxydized in the earth; and when we are obliged to base our conclusions respecting the use of that metal, by an evidently rude people, upon such remains, if any there be, the strictest examination should be given them ; appearances alone should be disregarded, and conclusions, after all, drawn with extreme caution. Whether it is likely the requisite discrimination and judgment were exercised in this case, it is not undertaken to say. But few masses of native iron, and these of small size and meteoric origin, have been found in this country ; consequently the presence of iron to any extent amongst the mound-builders, can be accounted for only on the assumption that they understood the difficult art of reducing it from the ores, which involvesa degree of knowledge and an advance in the arts of civilization, not attained by the Mexicans nor by the Peruvians, and not sustained by the authenticated remains of the mounds,
