surface of the water. Clocks and
watches would become empty cases. There would be no machines for
manufacturing or for agriculture, not even a spade to dig a garden.
Everybody would be out of work. If you wish to see how it would seem,
try for an hour to use nothing that is of iron or has been made by
using iron.

VIII

OUR GOOD FRIEND COPPER

Where did rocks come from?

Some were deposited in water, like limestone and like the shale and
sandstone that lie over the strata of coal. Others were made by fire,
and were thrown up in a melted state from the interior of the earth.
Such rocks are the Giant's Causeway in Ireland and the Palisades of
the Hudson River. They are called "igneous" rocks, from the Latin word
_ignis_ meaning "fire."

When the igneous rocks were thrown up to the surface of the earth,
they brought various metals with them. How the metals happened to be
there ready to be brought up, no one knows. Some people think they
were dissolved in water and then deposited; others think that
electricity had something to do with their formation. However that may
be, metals were brought up with the igneous rocks, and one of these
metals is copper.

Now, to one who did not know how to work iron, copper was indeed a
wonderful treasure, for it made very good knives and spoons. The
people who lived in this country long before the Indians came
understood how to use it, and after a while the Indians themselves
found out its value. They did not trouble themselves to dig for it;
they simply picked it up from the ground, good pure metal in lumps;
and with stones for hammers they beat it into knives.

There was only one place in what is now the United States where they
could do this, and that was in northern Michigan. A long point of land
stretches out into Lake Superior as if it was trying to see what could
be found there. Just beyond its reach is Isle Royal; and in these two
places there was plenty of copper, enough for the Indians, enough for
the people who have come after them, and enough for a great many more.
One piece of copper which the Indians did not pick up, and the United
States Government did, is the famous Ontonagon Boulder, so called
because it was found near the Ontonagon River. It weighs more than
three tons. The Indians would have been glad to make use of it, but it
was too hard for their tools, and so they are said to have worshiped
it as a god. It is now in the National Museum in Washington