5. _Mineral Products._--In considering the Mineral Products, I ask attention first to the indications afforded by the early navigators. They were not geologists. They saw only what was exposed. And yet, during the long interval that elapsed, not very much has been added to their conclusions. The existence of iron is hardly less uncertain now than then. The existence of copper is hardly more certain now than then. Gold, which is so often a dangerous _ignis-fatuus_, did not appear to deceive them. But coal, which is much more desirable than gold, was reported by several, and once at least with reasonable certainty. The boat that landed from Behring, when he discovered the coast, found among other things “a whetstone on which it appeared that copper knives had been sharpened.” This was the first sign of the mineral wealth which already excites such interest. At another point where Behring landed, “one of the Americans had a knife hanging by his side, of which his people took particular notice on account of its unusual make.”[132] It has been supposed that this was of iron. Next came Cook, who, when in Prince William Sound, saw “copper and iron.” In his judgment, the iron came, “through the intervention of the more inland tribes, from Hudson’s Bay, or the settlements on the Canadian lakes,” and his editor refers in a note to the knife seen by Behring as from the same quarter; but Cook thought that the copper was obtained near at home, as the natives, when engaged in barter, gave the idea, “that, having so much of this metal of their own, they wanted no more.”[133] Naturally enough, for they were not far from the Copper River. Maurelle, in 1779, landed in sight of Mount St. Elias, and he reports Indians with arrow-heads of copper, which “made the Spaniards suspect mines of this metal there.”[134] La Pérouse, who was also in this neighborhood, after mentioning that the naturalists of the expedition allowed no stone or pebble to escape observation, reports ochre, copper pyrites, garnets, schorl, granite, schist, horn-stone, very pure quartz, mica, plumbago, coal, and then adds that some of these substances announce that the mountains conceal mines of iron and copper. He reports further that the natives had daggers of iron, and sometimes of red copper; that the latter metal was common enough, serving for ornaments and for the points of arrows; and he then states the very question of Cook with regard to the acquisition of these metals. He insists also that “the natives know how to forge iron and work copper.”[135] Spears and arrows “pointed with bone or iron,” and also “an iron dagger” for each man, appear in Vancouver’s account of the natives on the parallel of 55°, just within the southern limit of Russian America.[136] Lisiansky saw at Sitka “a thin plate made of virgin copper” found on Copper River, three feet in length, and at one end twenty-two inches in breadth, with various figures painted on one side, which had come from the possession