Among the barbarous races of the northern continent, the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy, though scarcely rising above the hunter stage, offer a subject of study of peculiar value in reference to the ethnology of the New World. In the great valley of the St. Lawrence, at the period of earliest European contact with its native tribes, we find this confederacy of Indian nations in the most primitive condition as to all knowledge of progressive arts; but full of energy, delighting in military enterprise, and amply endued with the qualities requisite for effecting permanent conquests over a civilised but unwarlike people. Nor did the primitive arts of the Iroquois prevent the development of incipient germs of civilisation among them. Agriculture was systematically practised; and their famous league, wisely established, and maintained unbroken through very diversified periods of their history, exhibits a people advancing in many ways towards the initiation of a self-originated civilisation, when the intrusion of Europeans abruptly arrested its progress, and brought them in contact with elements of foreign progress pregnant for them only with sources of degradation and final destruction. The historian of the Iroquois,[71] when describing their simple arts and manufactures, remarks, that in the western mounds rows of arrow-heads or flint-blades have been found lying side by side, like teeth, the row being about two feet long. “This has suggested the idea that they were set in a frame, and fastened with thongs, thus making a species of sword.”[72] In this description we cannot fail to recognise the _mahguahuitl_, or native sword of Mexico and Yucatan. In the large canoe with its armed crew, first met off the latter coast, Herrera tells us the Indians had “swords made of wood, having a gutter in the forepart, in which were sharp-edged flints strongly fixed with a sort of bitumen and thread.” Among the Mexicans this toothed blade was armed with the _itzli_, or obsidian, capable of taking an edge like a razor; and the destructive powers of this formidable weapon are frequently dwelt upon by the early Spaniards. Among the ruins of Kabah, in Yucatan, the attention of Stephens was attracted by the protruding corner of a huge sculptured slab, the basso-relievos on which consist of an upright figure having a lofty plume of feathers falling to his heels; while another figure kneels before him holding in his hands the very same weapon, with its flint or obsidian blades projecting from the wooden socket. The idea it suggests is not necessarily that assumed by Stephens: that the sculptors and architects of the great ruins of Central America and Yucatan were the same people whom the Spaniards found there on their landing. The sculpture may be of a greatly older date. On its lower compartment is a row of hieroglyphics; and the suppliant attitude of the armed figure is rather suggestive of a record