Of the wooden implements, the most noticeable are the shovels, by means of which the soil was excavated. The accompanying woodcut represents two of them worn away to the one side, as in most of the examples found, as if used for scraping rather than digging the soil. Mr. Whittlesey gives a drawing of one which measured three and a half feet long, recovered among the loose materials thrown out from an extensive rock excavation in the side of a hill about four miles south-east of Eagle Harbour. Part of a wooden bowl used for baling water, and troughs of cedar-bark, were also found in the same débris, above which grew a birch about two feet in diameter, with its lower roots scarcely reaching through the ancient rubbish to the depth at which those relics lay. Mr. Foster describes another wooden bowl found at a depth of ten feet, in clearing out some ancient workings opened by the agent of the Forest Mine; and which, from the splintered pieces of rock and gravel imbedded in its rim, must have been employed in baling water. Similar implements have been met with in other workings, but they speedily perish on being exposed to the air. All of them appear to have been made of white cedar. The indestructible nature of this wood, when kept under water, or in a moist soil, is abundantly illustrated by the experience of settlers who, on attempting to clear and cultivate a cedar swamp, discover that the dead trunks, exhumed undecayed after centuries of immersion, rest above still older cedar-forests, seemingly unaffected by the influences which restore alike the oak and the pine to the vegetable mould of the forest soil. [Illustration: FIG. 64.—Miners’ Stone Mauls.]