This voyage of Cartier, made in 1535, was the earliest visit by any navigator on record to this region. It was eighty years before the Recollects or any other missionaries had approached the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There was, therefore, no intercourse previous to this that would be likely to furnish the natives with European utensils of any kind, particularly knives of _red copper_. It is impossible to suppose that this knife, seen by Cartier, and declared by the natives to have come from the Saguenay, a term then covering an indefinite region stretching we know not how far to the north and west, could be otherwise than of Indian manufacture. In the text, Champlain distinctly states on the testimony of an Algonquin chief that it was the custom of the Indians to melt copper for the purpose of forming it into sheets, and it is obvious that it would require scarcely greater ingenuity to fabricate moulds in which to cast the various implements which they needed in their simple arts. Some of these implements, with indubitable marks of having been cast in moulds, have been recently discovered, with a multitude of others, which may or may not have passed through the same process. The testimony of Champlain in the text, and the examples of moulded copper found in the lake region, render the evidence, in our judgment, entirely conclusive that the art of working copper both by fusion and malleation existed among the Indians of America at the time of its first occupation by the French. During the period of five years, beginning in 1871, an enthusiastic antiquary, Mr. F. S. Perkins, of Wisconsin, collected, within the borders of his own State, a hundred and forty-two copper implements, of a great variety of forms, and designed for numerous uses, as axes, hatchets, spear-heads, arrowheads, knives, gouges, chisels, adzes, augers, gads, drills, and other articles of anomalous forms. These are now deposited in the archives of the Historical Society of Wisconsin. Other collections are gradually forming. The process is of necessity slow, as they are not often found in groups, but singly, here and there, as they are turned up by the plough or spade or other implements of husbandry. The statement of Champlain in the text, and the testimony of Carrier three-quarters of a century earlier, to which we have referred, give a new historical significance to these recent discoveries, and both together throw a fresh light upon the prehistoric period.