he Stone Age; that is, they made their tools
and weapons of stone. But there are great lumps of copper beside one
of our lakes here. Now copper, you know, is a rather soft metal, and
the red men about here learned to pound it into shape for weapons.
They called both their stone hatchets and copper hatchets 'tomahawks.'

"Red men never learned to melt iron and make tools of it as we do,
though there was plenty of iron in the mountains among which many
tribes lived. The red men never got beyond the Stone Age and into the
Iron Age as white men did."

"Where did you get all these beautiful stone things?" the boy asked
after a while, looking at them with longing eyes.

"I have been years in getting them together," the doctor said. "Many
of them I found myself, on my walks through the country. Others I
bought from the people who found them."

"You must love them very much," said the boy.

"I do," said his friend, "and some day I shall give them all to a
museum where they will be kept for people to see."

CHAPTER XVI

HOW STONE WEAPONS OF THE CAVE MEN WERE FIRST FOUND

If you should cross the broad ocean that lies toward the rising sun,
you would come to a beautiful country called France. Here grow the
olive, the orange, and the grape; and the mulberry, on which the silk
worm feeds. But it is not with these that we have to do to-day, but
with some strange old things that once lay buried far below the soil in
which they grow.

About seventy years ago, a man in that country who sold sand and gravel
found that his own gravel pits were worked out. He went to the banks
of a river--the river Somme--near by and found a good gravel bed, which
he began to cut down and cart off to sell. He dug away at the hill for
months and got far below the top of the ground. Then one day his spade
struck something hard; he dug it out and saw that it was a very large
bone.

"That is a queer bone," he said to himself. "I wonder what animal it
belonged to. It is too big to have been the bone of a horse or a cow.
It is big enough to have belonged to an elephant. Well, no matter what
it came from," he said, throwing it aside, "it is neither sand nor
gravel, so it is nothing to me."

As he dug on, he threw out some rudely shaped stones.

"These are queer, too," he said, "but they will not sell for gravel."
And away went the stones from his shovel.

That evening a learned man from Paris, the most beautiful city of
France,