to melt the pure metal, and to mould the weapons and implements he required; if not to harden it with alloys, and to quarry and smelt the unfamiliar ores. To this stage the savage tribes of the New World have not even now attained, after intercourse with Europeans for more than three centuries and a half. There, on the contrary, the Indians, who originally possessed only weapons, implements, and personal ornaments of bone, shell, flint, and stone, or at most of native copper rudely hammered into shape, are still seen after an interval of upwards of three centuries of European colonisation and traffic, without the slightest acquired knowledge of working in metals. They do, indeed, possess numerous metal implements and weapons, which, as their greatest treasures, they freely lavish on the loved or honoured dead; but such traces of metallurgy afford no proof of acquired native art. The copper kettles of the ancient Huron graves on the Georgian Bay, or the Chinook coffin-biers on the Columbia river, were brought, not from the copper regions of Lake Superior, but from France, London, or Liverpool, along with the beads, knives, hatchets, and other objects of barter, by means of which the fur-traders still carry on their traffic with the Indian hunter. At most this only proves that a race, still in its stone-period, and possessing no greater skill than is required to grind an iron hoop into lance or arrow-heads, has been brought into contact with a civilised people, familiar with metallurgy and many acquired arts, such as the musket and the rifle may most aptly symbolise. [Illustration: FIG. 57.—South Pacific Stone Implements.]