ure of nickel
in this meteoric iron has not only preserved it, but caused a polished
surface to gleam white, as though plated with silver, while tarnishing
less easily than that metal. No doubt it was among the most highly
prized of all the treasures of those old days, and nothing more precious
than this could have been offered as a sacrifice, when, with lavish
hand, pearls and silver and gold, weapons and tools, household furniture
and products of the chase and the farm, were heaped upon the funeral
pyre or contributed to the sacrificial flame.

In materials illustrating the life and crafts of the Indians during the
last century and at present, this museum is not yet so well supplied as
some others,--that at Washington, for example, which has been
constituted the depository for the collections of scores of government
expeditions into the West and North. Nevertheless, some things of great
value and completeness in this way are already owned. Thus, in the South
American room may be seen a series of specimens illustrating the whole
operation of pottery-making among the Caribs of British Guiana. This was
obtained several years ago by Professor H. A. Ward, who bought the
entire stock of materials of a woman of that tribe whom he found at
work. These consisted of a mass of clay ready for the potter, a number
of vessels ready for the fire, others which had been burned, and several
ornamented in colors. The gourd scrapers of several shapes, with which
she smoothed the vessels, small, smooth stones used in polishing the raw
colors, and other appurtenances, are included, together with toy vessels
which the woman hastily pinched into shape and gave to her children as
playthings to amuse them while she worked, the forms of which help to
explain many similar articles found in ancient graves.

With like completeness, when Dr. E. Palmer was exploring for the museum
the nitre-caves in Northern Mexico, anciently occupied as places of
human sepulture, he sent with the "mummies" extracted from them a full
series of such natural products of the vicinity as would enable the
museum to exhibit the leaves, fibres, and other vegetable productions
from which the cloth, baskets, and so forth were constructed by the
people who placed their dead in the caves. Dr. Palmer also sent a full
set of the rude apparatus by which the present Indians of Mexico make
their cactus-cakes and syrup, from the thorn-tipped pole with which the
prickly fruit is gat