It is vain to urge such dubious evidence as the fancied traces of a mould-ridge, or the solitary example of a casting of uncertain age, in proof of a knowledge of the furnace and the crucible among any North American tribe. Everywhere in Europe the soil yields not only its buried relics of gold, copper, and bronze, but also stone and bronze moulds in which implements and personal ornaments were cast. When the ingenious systematising of Danish archæologists had familiarised the students of antiquity with the idea of a succession of Stone, Bronze, and Iron periods in the history of Europe, the question naturally followed, whether metallurgy did not begin, there, as elsewhere, in the easy working of virgin copper. Dr. Latham accordingly remarked, in his _Ethnology of the British Islands_, on the supposition that no unalloyed copper relics had been found in Britain: “Stone and bone first; then bronze, or copper and tin combined; but no copper alone. I cannot get over this hiatus; cannot imagine a metallurgic industry beginning with the use of alloys.” It was a mistake, however, to assume that no copper relics had ever been found. At first it had been taken for granted that all such implements were of the familiar alloy. But so soon as the importance of the distinction was recognised, examples of pure copper were forthcoming. So early as 1822, Sir David Brewster described a large axe of peculiar shape, and formed of copper, which was found in the hard black till-clay at a depth of twenty feet under Ratho Bog, near Edinburgh. This is no solitary example. The Scottish Museum of Antiquities has other implements of pure copper; and Sir William Wilde states in reference to the collections of the Royal Irish Academy: “upon careful examination, it has been found that thirty of the rudest, and apparently the very oldest celts, are of red, almost unalloyed copper”; as is also the case with some other rudely formed tools in the same collection. It was a temporary advantage, doubtless, but a real loss, to the Indian miners of Lake Superior that they found the native copper there ready to hand, a pure ductile metal, probably regarded by them as only a variety of stone which—unlike its rocky matrix,—they could bend, or hammer into shape, without fracture. Its value as such was widely appreciated. Copper tools, everywhere retaining the specs, or larger crystals of silver, characteristic of the Lake Superior veins, tell of the diffusion of the metal from that single source throughout all the vast regions watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries, and eastward by lake and river to the gulf of the St. Lawrence and the mouth of the Hudson.