ays. Their objects of
art, such as the remarkable wooden mortars found at Key Marco and the
embossed copper plates found elsewhere in Florida, point to a highly
developed artistic sense which was no longer in evidence at the coming
of the white man.

It is interesting to see the way in which climatic energy tended to give
the Five Nations a marked superiority over the tribesmen of the South,
while agriculture tended in the opposite direction. There has been much
discussion as to the part played by agriculture among the primitive
Americans, especially in the northeast. Corn, beans, and squashes were
an important element in the diet of the Indians of the New England
region, while farther south potatoes, sunflower seeds, and melons
were also articles of food. The New England tribes knew enough about
agriculture to use fish and shells for fertilizer. They had wooden
mattocks and hoes made from the shoulder blades of deer, from tortoise
shells, or from conch shells set in handles. They also had stone hoes
and spades, while the women used short pickers or parers about a foot
long and five inches wide. Seated on the ground they used these to
break the upper part of the soil and to grub out weeds, grass, and old
cornstalks. They had the regular custom of burning over an old patch
each year and then replanting it. Sometimes they merely put the seeds in
holes and sometimes they dug up and loosened the ground for each seed.
Clearings they made by girdling the trees, that is, by cutting off the
bark in a circle at the bottom and thus causing the tree to die. The
brush they hacked or broke down and burned when it was dry enough.

There is much danger of confusing the agricultural condition of the
Indian after the European had modified his life with his condition
before the European came to America. For instance, in the excellent
article on agriculture in the "Handbook of American Indians," conditions
prevailing as late as 1794 in the States south of the Great Lakes are
spoken of as if typical of aboriginal America. But at that time the
white man had long been in contact with the Indian, and iron tools
had largely taken the place of stone. The rapidity with which European
importations spread may be judged by the fact that as early as 1736 the
Iroquois in New York not only had obtained horses but were regularly
breeding them. The use of the iron axe of course spread with vastly
greater rapidity than that of the horse, for an axe or a