tained numbers of implements and weapons of this
very peculiar material. Any one who does not know obsidian may imagine
great masses of bottle-glass, such as our orthodox ugly wine-bottles
are made of, very hard, very brittle, and--if one breaks it with any
ordinary implement--going, as glass does, in every direction but the
right one. We saw its resemblance to this portwine-bottle-glass in an
odd way at the Ojo de Agua, where the wall of the hacienda was armed at
the top, after our English fashion, apparently with bits of old
bottles, but which turned out to be chips of obsidian. Out of this
rather unpromising stuff the Mexicans made knives, razors, arrow- and
spear-heads, and other things, some of great beauty. I say nothing of
the polished obsidian mirrors and ornaments, nor even of the curious
masks of the human face that are to be seen in collections, for these
were only laboriously cut and polished with jewellers' sand, to us a
common-place process.

[Illustration: STONE SPEAR-HEADS AND OBSIDIAN KNIVES AND ARROW-HEADS,
FROM MEXICO. 1. Flame shaped Arrow-head; obsidian: Teleohuacan. 2.
Arrow-head; opake obsidian: Teleohuacan. 3. Knife or Razor of Obsidian;
shown in two aspects; Mexico. 4. Leaf-shaped Knife or Javelin-head;
obsidian: from Real Del Monte. 5. Spear-head of Chalcedony; one of a
pair supposed to be spears of State: found in excavating for the Casa
Grande, Tezcuco. (This peculiar opalescent chalcedony occurs as
concretions, sometimes of large size, in the trachytic lavas of
Mexico.)]

Cortes found the barbers at the great market of Tlatelolco busy shaving
the natives with such razors, and he and his men had experience of
other uses of the same material in the flights of obsidian-headed
arrows which "darkened the sky," as they said, and the more deadly
wooden maces stuck all over with obsidian points, and of the priests'
sacrificial knives too, not long after. These things were not cut and
polished, but made by chipping or cracking off pieces from a lump. This
one can see by the traces of conchoidal fracture which they all show.

The art is not wholly understood, for it perished soon after the
Conquest, when iron came in; but, as far as the theory is concerned, I
think I can give a tolerably satisfactory account of the process of
manufacture. In the first place, the workman who makes gun-flints could
probably make some of the simpler obsidian implements, which were no
doubt chipped off in the same way.