“These obsidian blades of the Indians of northwestern California have been called, and in a measure are, sacred. Nevertheless the term can be applied to them only qualifiedly. They are primarily objects of wealth. Their display in important ceremonies, their preciousness, and the general disposition of these Indians to connect exhibitions of wealth and ceremonies, give to these objects certain associations of a religious nature. They do not, however, appear to be sacred in the same sense in which a small class of other objects, such as certain pipes, fire-sticks, and similar ceremonial paraphernalia, which are used in a purely ritualistic way and whose value lies entirely in this ritualistic and traditionary use, are sacred. Like the white deerskins and woodpecker scalp-ornaments, the obsidian blades are not used directly in connection with any of the sacred formulas around which the deeper religious life of these Indians clusters. There seems also to be very little and probably no sense of their being charms or objects with a fetish or medicine or animistic power. They are thus sacred in a very different sense from the objects belonging to an altar of the Pueblo Indians, or from the objects contained in a sacred bundle of the Plains Indians. Their general position in the ceremonies and social life of the Indians of northwestern California resembles more nearly that of the coppers of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast.” [Illustration: FIG. 217. _(S. 1–1.)_ _A red and brown obsidian blade, found on the shore of Goose Lake, California, by the Reverend H. C. Meredith, in 1905. H. K. Deisher’s collection, Kutztown, Pennsylvania._ ] A study of chipped implements of the varieties presented in the foregoing pages opens up a field of research of great possibilities. A comparison of types, an examination of material—in other words, the same technical work that classical scholars spend in research into certain phases of Greek and Roman archæology—will lead to important results. For instance, chips of a certain stone, which appear to have come from Labrador, are said to be found occasionally in Maine or Massachusetts. If this statement is true, it leads us to question whether the Eskimo and the New England natives bartered, or whether there was a migration in earliest times from Labrador to New England, or _vice versa_. Or, whether the stone is found in New England as well as in Labrador. The Ozark Mountain region, a strange country about sixty miles in extent, where Dr. Peabody and myself found evidence of culture different from any other existing in this country, contains two kinds of chipped material: that found on the surface generally, and that which occurs in the caves and caverns occupied by man. The one can be differentiated from the other. Both might be called “flint,” or “chert,” and yet each came from a different site and represents a different culture.