[Illustration: BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY TENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. XII PETROGLYPHS IN MAINE.] The rock upon which the glyphs appear is in the town of Machiasport, Maine, at Clarks point, on the northwestern side of Machias bay, 2 miles below the mouth of Machias river. The rock or ledge is about 50 feet long from east to west and about fifteen feet in width, nearly horizontal for two-thirds its length, from the bank or western end at high water, thence inclining at an angle of 15° to low-water mark. Its southern face is inclined about 40°. The formation is schistose slate, having a transverse vein of trap dike extending nearly across its section. Nearly the entire ledge is of blue-black color, very dense and hard except at the upper or western end, where the periodical formation of ice has scaled off thin layers of surface and destroyed many figures which are remembered by persons now living. The ebb and flow of tides, the abrasion of moving beach stones or pebble wash and of ice-worn bowlders, have also effaced many figures along the southern side, until now but one or two indentations are discernible. Visitors, in seeking to remove some portion of the rock as a curiosity or in striving to perpetuate their initials, have obscured several of the most interesting, and until recently the best defined figures. It was also evident to the present writer, who carefully examined the rock in 1888, that it lay much deeper in the water than once had been the case. At the lowest tides there were markings seen still lower, which could not readily have been made if that part of the surface had not been continuously exposed. The depression of a rock of such great size, which was so gradual that it had not been observed by the inhabitants of the neighboring settlement, is an evidence of the antiquity of the peckings. The intaglio carving of all the figures was apparently made by repeated blows of a pointed instrument--doubtless of hard stone; not held as a chisel, but working by a repetition of hammerings or peckings. The deepest now seen is about three-eighths of an inch. The amount of patient labor bestowed upon these figures must have been great, considering the hardness of the rock and the rude implement with which they were wrought. There is no extrinsic evidence of their age. The place was known to traders early in the seventeenth century, and much earlier was visited by Basque fishermen, and perhaps by the unfortunate Cortereals in 1500 and 1503. The descendants of the Mechises Indians, a tribal branch of the Abnaki, who once occupied the territory between the St. Croix and Narraguagus rivers, when questioned many years ago, would reply in substance that “all their old men knew of them,” either by having seen them or by traditions handed down through many generations.