[Illustration: A stone ax]
"This is not stone," the boy said at last.
"No," said the doctor, "that is a copper hatchet. I was very glad to get that because there are not many of them found now. You know that when Columbus came to our country, red men lived all over the land. They were in what we call the Stone Age; that is, they made their tools and weapons of stone. But there are great lumps of copper beside one of our lakes here. Now copper, you know, is a rather soft metal, and the red men about here learned to pound it into shape for weapons. They called both their stone hatchets and copper hatchets 'tomahawks.'
"Red men never learned to melt iron and make tools of it as we do, though there was plenty of iron in the mountains among which many tribes lived. The red men never got beyond the Stone Age and into the Iron Age as white men did."
"Where did you get all these beautiful stone things?" the boy asked after a while, looking at them with longing eyes.
"I have been years in getting them together," the doctor said. "Many of them I found myself, on my walks through the country. Others I bought from the people who found them."
"You must love them very much," said the boy.
"I do," said his friend, "and some day I shall give them all to a museum where they will be kept for people to see."
CHAPTER XVI
HOW STONE WEAPONS OF THE CAVE MEN WERE FIRST FOUND
If you should cross the broad ocean that lies toward the rising sun, you would come to a beautiful country called France. Here grow the olive, the orange, and the grape; and the mulberry, on which the silk worm feeds. But it is not with these that we have to do to-day, but with some strange old things that once lay buried far below the soil in which they grow.
About seventy years ago, a man in that country who sold sand and gravel found that his own gravel pits were worked out. He went to the banks of a river—the river Somme—near by and found a good gravel bed, which he began to cut down and cart off to sell. He dug away at the hill for months and got far below the top of the ground. Then one day his spade struck something hard; he dug it out and saw that it was a very large bone.
"That is a queer bone," he said to himself. "I wonder what animal it belonged to. It is too big to have been the bone of a horse or a cow. It is big enough to have belonged to an elephant. Well, no matter what it came from," he said, throwing it aside, "it is neither sand nor gravel, so it is nothing to me."
As he dug on, he threw out some rudely shaped stones.
"These are queer, too," he said, "but they will not sell for gravel." And away went the stones from his shovel.
That evening a learned man from Paris, the most beautiful city of France, was walking beside the river and looking at the sunset clouds in sky and water.
There in the pit lay the big bones. He saw them. Forgotten were clouds and sky! He knew that he was looking at the bones of some animal long since gone from the earth! For years after that, he watched the work in the gravel pits and carried away any bones and shaped stones that were dug out. He studied them and found that some of the bones were those of the mammoth, and that there were bones of the rhinoceros too.
At last he showed the bones and the stones to the learned men in Paris, and said, "These stones are very old; they are as old as the ground in which they lay. They were shaped by men who knew very little and had very little, and who used them for weapons. Near the stone weapons were these bones of the mammoth and the rhinoceros. So those animals lived at the time the men did, and in this country."
The learned men listened, but did not believe what he said.
A few years after that, however,—about twenty years,—other shaped stones were found on the banks of the river that flows by the great city of London, in England, across the narrow water from France. And in Denmark, another country near France, still more shaped stones were found, and, with them, bones of the reindeer.
Then the learned men had to believe that men who shaped stones once lived in England and France and Denmark; and that at the same time lived the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the reindeer; and that the men had very little and knew very little, and made the shaped stones for weapons.
