"When they were discovered the race had wrought out unaided a development far in advance of any of the old barbaric races of Europe. They were still in the age of stone, but entering upon the age of iron. Their implements were mainly of stone and flint and bone, yet they had learned the art of making copper pipes and ornaments. This would rank their civilization about with that of the Germans in the days of Tacitus (about the year 200 A.D.). They had, unaided by the civilization of Europe, made great progress. They had learned to weave cloth out of wild hemp and other grasses, and to extract dyes from vegetable substances; how to make earthen pots and kettles; how to make large water casks from the bark of trees, as well as the lightest and fleetest canoes; had passed from the cave to the dwelling house; had established the family relation and democratic forms of government; their wives were the most faithful, their young women the most brilliant in paint and garments and robes of furs; they carved figures on stone, and wrote the story of their lives in hieroglyphics, of which some of the finest specimens in America are preserved in the senate house in Kingston; and most remarkable of all, and that which carries back their chronology to a period that cannot be defined, they had developed spoken languages that were rich in grammatical forms, differing radically from any of the ancient and modern languages of the old hemisphere, languages which were surely ingenious, and of which it was said by the most expert philologists of Europe that they were among 'the most expressive languages, dead or living.' . . . They were savages or barbarians, as you may please to call them, men who wrote their vengeance in many scenes of blood, the recital of which around the firesides of the pioneers became more terrifying by repetition; nevertheless they were representatives of a race whose civilization, though it was 1200 years behind our own, had no faults greater than were found in the races from which we boast our lineage." In Samuel Eager's "History of Orange County," published in 1846-7, are found statements presenting a different conception of Indian qualities. It says: