But the industrious miners fully appreciated the practical utility of the metal they were in search of; and it is not to be supposed that they employed themselves thus laboriously in mining copper, and yet themselves used only stone and wooden tools. Copper axes, gads, chisels, and gouges, as well as knives and spear-heads, of considerable diversity of form, have been brought to light, all of them wrought from the virgin copper by means of the hammer, without smelting, alloy, or the use of fire. At Ontonagon, I had an opportunity of examining an interesting collection of mining relics, found a few months before. These consisted of copper tools, with solid triangular blades like bayonets, one fourteen inches, and the others about twelve inches in length; a chisel, and two singularly shaped copper gouges about fourteen inches long and two inches wide, the precise use of which it would be difficult to determine. The whole were discovered buried in a bed of clay on the banks of the river Ontonagon, about a mile above its mouth, during the process of levelling it for the purposes of a brick-field. Above the clay was an alluvial deposit of two feet of sand, and in this, and over the relics of the ancient copper workers, a pine-tree had grown to full maturity. Its gigantic roots gave proof, in the estimation of those who witnessed their removal, of more than two centuries’ growth; while the present ordinary level of the river is such that it would require a rise of forty feet to make the deposit of sand beneath which they lay. [Illustration: FIG. 65.—Ontonagon Copper Implement.] An experienced practical miner, who had been among the first to reopen some of the ancient works at the Minnesota mine, recognised in the copper gouges implements adapted to produce the singular tool-marks which then excited his curiosity. Subjoined is a representation of a peculiar type of copper tools, sketched from one of those found at Ontonagon. The socket, formed by hammering out the lower part flat, and then turning it over partially at each side, corresponds to some primitive forms of bronze implements found in Britain and the north of Europe; but the latter are cast of a metallic compound, and prove a skill in metallurgy far in advance of the old metal-workers of Ontonagon.