Those who lived in the north had discovered the use of copper and had shaped for themselves knives and spear blades out of copper, but not even this metal was in use to any great extent, and for the most part they relied, down to the end of the eighteenth century, for their implements and weapons, on polished and sharpened stones, on deer's antlers, buffalo horns, sticks, sharp shells, beavers' incisor teeth,[3] the claws or spines of crustaceans, flints, and suchlike substances--in short, they were leading the same life and using almost exactly the same tools as the long-since-vanished hunter races of Europe of five thousand to one hundred thousand years ago--the people who pursued the mammoth, the bison, the Irish "elk", and the other great beasts of prehistoric Europe.

Indeed, North America represented to some extent, as late as a hundred years ago, what Europe must have looked like in the days of palaeolithic Man.
[Footnote 3: Of which they made very serviceable chisels.] * * * * * The AMERINDIANS of the Canadian Dominion (when the country first became known to Europeans) belonged to the following groups and tribes.

The order of enumeration begins in the east and proceeds westwards.

I have already mentioned the peculiar _Beothiks_ of Newfoundland.[4] In Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and the Gaspe Peninsula there were the _Mikmak_ Indians belonging to the widespread ALGONKIN family or stock.

West and south of the Mikmaks, in New Brunswick and along the borders of New England, were other tribes of the Algonkin group: the Etchemins, Abenakis, Tarratines, Penobscots, _Mohikans_, and Adirondacks.