How far back in the ages the use of pearls on this continent extends cannot be estimated. The discovery of them in the mounds east of the Mississippi, which are credited to an ancient race that finally succumbed to the similar but more war-like red men found here when the country was discovered by Europeans, suggests many centuries. And the use of pearls to the extent manifest by the discoveries, favors the theory that the mound-builders had reached a degree of refinement never attained by the North American Indians of record. When white men invaded the North American continent, they found tribes of red men as rugged as the coasts of New England. Inured to hardships, despising pain, contemptuous of death, they lived by hunting and found their chief pleasure in the slaughter of their enemies. Camping at will, their lodges were here to-day and there to-morrow, and brutal if heroic, they roamed over fields once inhabited by a race which had passed, but left evidence that they were sufficiently civilized to appreciate the pearl. In Florida and South America, the conditions, when the country was discovered by the Spaniards, were different. The ancient races, corresponding with the mound-builders of the north, undisturbed by the incursions of stronger tribes, had continued to progress and had reached a high degree of barbarous luxury. In Mexico, when Montezuma gave audience to Cortez, he was ablaze with gold and silver and precious stones. His cloak and sandals were adorned with pearls. Pearls were used to decorate temples, canoes and even the paddles. Indian women had great strings of them coiled around their necks and arms, and the chiefs used them freely on all occasions of state. It was the same on the Colombian coasts. At the island of Cubagua and on the main coast, Columbus found great quantities of pearls, as did De Soto and his followers when they landed at Tampa Bay, known by the Spaniards as "Spiritu Santo," in Florida in 1539. The Incas of Peru also owned many fine pearls. Though the natives of all these countries ignorantly injured the gems by cooking the oyster to extract them, or by their crude methods of boring, and reckoned them of little value as compared with the European idea, they nevertheless esteemed them as jewels and must have done so for ages, for the invaders found them in the sepulchres of the dead, so altered by the processes of time that they retained nothing of their original beauty. From these premises therefore it can be said of the antiquity of the pearl in this hemisphere, that it had been used as a jewel for some centuries before the early part of the sixteenth century.