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 of other
implements of husbandry. The statement of Champlain in the text, and