This was supplemented by an editorial note in No. 62 of the same publication, page 467, as follows:
A correspondent from Newark, Ohio, warns us that any inscribed stones said to originate from that locality may be looked upon as spurious. Years ago certain parties in that place made a business of manufacturing and burying inscribed stones and other objects in the autumn, and exhuming them the following spring in the presence of innocent witnesses. Some of the parties to these frauds afterwards confessed to them; and no such objects, except such as were spurious, have ever been known from that region.
The correspondent of Science probably remembered the operations of David Wyrick, of Newark, who, to prove his theory that the Hebrews were the mound-builders, discovered in 1860 a tablet bearing on one side a truculent “likeness” of Moses with his name in Hebrew, and on the other a Hebrew abridgment of the ten commandments. A Hebrew bible afterwards found in Mr. Wyrick’s private room threw some light on the inscribed characters.
As the business of making and selling archæological frauds has become so extensive in Egypt and Palestine, it can be no matter of surprise that it has been attempted by the enterprising people of the United States. The Bureau of Ethnology has discovered several centers of that fraudulent industry.
Without further pursuing the subject of mercenary frauds, an example may be mentioned which was brought forth during the researches of the present writer and his assistant, Dr. Hoffman, which is probably as good a case of a modern antique in this line as can be presented. Figure 208 is a copy of a drawing taken from an Ojibwa pipe-stem, obtained by Dr. Hoffman from an officer of the United States Army, who had procured it from an Indian in Saint Paul, Minnesota. On a later and more minute examination, it appeared that the pipe-stem had been purchased at a store in Saint Paul, which had furnished a large number of similar objects, so large as to awaken suspicion that they were in the course of daily manufacture. The figures and characters on the pipe-stem were drawn in colors. In the present figure, which is without colors, the horizontal lines represent blue and the vertical red, according to the heraldic scheme several times used in this paper. The outlines were drawn in a dark neutral tint, in some lines approaching black; the triangular characters, representing lodges, being also in a neutral tint, or an ashen hue, and approaching black in several instances. The explanation of the figures, made before there was any suspicion of their real character, is as follows:
Fig. 208.—Specimen of imitated pictograph.
The first figure is that of a bear, representing the individual to whom the record pertains. The three hearts above the line, according to an expression in gesture language, signifies a brave heart; increased numbers indicating much or many, i. e., a large brave heart.
The second figure, a circle inclosing a triradiate character, refers to the personal totem. The character in the middle resembles, to some extent, the pictograph sometimes found to represent stars, though in the latter the lines center upon the disks and not at a common point.
The seven triangular characters represent the lodges of a village to which the individual to whom reference is made belongs.