The Mexicans called copper or bronze “tepuztli,” a word of rather uncertain etymology.  Judging from the analogous words in languages allied to the Aztec, it seems not unlikely that it meant originally hatchet or breaker, just as “itztli,” or obsidian, appears to have meant originally knife.[12]

When the Mexicans saw iron in the hands of the Spaniards, they called it also “tepuztli,” which thus became a general word for metal; and then they had to distinguish iron from copper, as they do at the present day, by calling them “tliltic tepuztli,” and “chichiltic tepuztli;” that is, “black metal,” and “red metal.”

When the subject of the use of bronze in stone-cutting is discussed, as it so often is with special reference to Egypt, one may doubt whether people have not underrated its capabilities, when the proportion of tin is accurately adjusted to give the maximum hardness; and especially when a minute portion of iron enters into its composition.  Sir Gardner Wilkinson relates that he tried the edge of one of the Egyptian mason’s chisels upon the very stone it had evidently been once used to cut, and found that its edge was turned directly; and therefore he wonders that such a tool could have been used for the purpose, of course supposing that the tool as he found it was just as the mason left it.  This, however, is not quite certain.  If we bury a brass tool in a damp place for a few weeks, it will be found to have undergone a curious molecular change, and to have become quite soft and weak, or, as the workmen call it, dead.  We ought to be quite sure whether lying for centimes under ground may not have made some similar change in bronze.

I have seen many prickly pears in different places, but never such specimens as those that were growing among the stones in this old quarry.  They had gnarled and knotted trunks of hard wood, and were as big as pollard-oaks; their age must have been immense; but, unfortunately, one could not measure it, or it would have been a good criterion of the age of the quarry, which had not only been excavated but abandoned before their time.  In one of the caves was a human skeleton, blanched white and clean, and near it some one has stuck a cross, made of two bits of stick, in the crevices of a heap of stones.

Returning to the entrance of the quarry, well loaded with stone hammers and knives, we sat down to breakfast, in a cave, where our man had established himself with the horses.  An attempt on my part to cut German sausage with an obsidian knife proved a decided failure.