Chapter 1

Man the Inventor

One fine day a small speck of dust(it weighed only 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, which is very little as such luminaries go)wandered forth from its ancient mother, the Sun, and set up in business for itself.

The event did not cause much of a stir in Heaven, for the new recruit for stellar honors was so hopelessly insignificant that none of the older stars, which rived in a distant and more respectable part of the universe, were able to notice the arrival of their little brother, unless their inhabitants(as seems hardly likely)were possessed of better telescopes than those which to-day stand in our own observatories

But perhaps we had better not inquire too closely into the more humiliating aspects of the case, for when all is said and done we are all of us prisoners on this tiny round ball And, whether we like it or not, that little planetis our home and will probably continue to be our home for a good long time.

I do not, mean to imply that we shall never be able to venture forth into space and pay an occasional visit to other parts of the firmament. But it is doubtful whether any of the other planets would lend themselves for the purpose of permanent settlement by denizens of the earth.For either they are altogether uninhabitable(as most of the planets of our solar system seem to be)or if they have developed a life of their own, it must be much older than that which exists on our own floating prison and we should be very much out of place in a country which had started to learn the rudiments of civilization one or two million years before ourselves.

And that reminds me of something that has puzzled me for a long time.

Why are people so tremendously interested in detective stories?

“It is the mystery that attracts them,”is the usual answer, or“It is the fascination of watching a single vague clew develop into an iron chain of incontrovertible evidence.”

For all I know, that may be the true reason. But in that case I wonder why more of them don't take up the study of geology, for the story of our planet is one endless series of the most magnificent riddles and only a few of them have thus far been solved.The others obstinately refuse to divulge their secrets, but in all fairness to them it should be said that there is not a single one among all these various puzzles to which there is not a key.

The people of ancient times knew this and they forced the rocks and the plains which were their home to tell them a great many things about their origin and their early past, which were of tremendous importance. But their successors, the humble folk of the Middle Ages, although they were great heroes on the field of battle, were terrible cowards within the Realm of Reason.They asked no questions, but meekly accepted what they were told out of an old book, and curiosity about the planet on which they lived was regarded as nothing less than sacrilege.

To-day the Middle Ages have been relegated to the museum of historical curiosities. Another ten or twenty thousand years and the little crust on which we crawl around with such energy will hold no more mysteries than an aspirin tablet or a pumpkinpie.

It may seem that I am a little too generous with my thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, and juggle a bit too freely with the centuries. But that can hardly be helped in these days when fresh prehistoric discoveries have almost quadrupled the period during which we can speak of“history”in the accepted sense of the word as a“continuous methodical record of past events.”Besides, such a feeling of the vast duration of the existence of all the things with which we are familiar is very good for the soul and teaches us humility and patience.When we begin to realize that it took our ancestors something like 500,000 years to learn to walk on their hind legs, we feel a little more tolerant towards our own contemporaries when they fail to solve some important problem in less time than we think they ought to take and we get a better slant upon ourselves.We cease to be so terribly important.We become mere upstarts—creatures which did not make their appearance upon the surface of the planet until millions and millions of years after the majority of the other arrivals—rulers of the universe who only day before yesterday were admitted through the front gate.

As for the different steps which nature took to arrive at this fine conclusion-on-two-feet, we are still ignorant about many of the details, but in a general way we have at least a suspicion of how it came about.

It all began as soon as the outer crust of our planet had sufficiently cooled to support some sort of life. It was rapidly populated by an endless variety of plants and by multitudes of armor-clad, sightless creatures which spent their entire existence in the water and were the undisputed masters of the earth.

We know that some of them remained faithful to the sea and became the ancestors of the fishes upon which we feed to-day;that others developed wings and took to the air and became the grandparents of our modern birds. We have discovered that others, which belonged to the same family as the lizards and serpents of our own day, came to such great estate that for a long while it looked as if our planet was to be permanently dominated by reptiles.For the climate of that period(and please try to think in terms of millions of years and forget all about the dates in your history book, which represents only a couple of seconds in the calendar of eternity)—the moist, damp climate of that period greatly favored the development of gigantic monsters, which were as much at home in the water as they were on land and looked and behaved like animated dreadnoughts.

We also know that the period during which the air, the water and the land were the exclusive domain of beasts that measured forty or fifty or sixty feet and that had stomachs as large as the cabin of a fair-sized yacht, was suddenly followed by an era during which not a single one of them was to be found in any part of the globe.

How and in what way those early rulers of the world came to their ignominious death and why to-day they survive only in pocket-size editions—that is something of which, until a few years ago, we understood nothing at all. Now at last we are beginning to realize that there was not one single cause, but that there were a large number of complicated and interacting reasons and that the Law of the Inevitable Top-Heaviness of Things, which rules all living matter, had a great deal to do with it.

You know what is happening to-day in the realm of arms. All the good intentions in the world and all the Leagues of Nations in the world are not half as important in making the world safe the reasonably inclined citizens as the plain, prosaic fact that the machinery of modern war has grown so cumbersome, has become so incredibly top-heavy, that soon through sheer bulk it will no longer be able to float nor fly nor ride nor go on foot, but will be obliged to wobble and waddle and groan and grunt like a truck in the mire.

The creatures whose ridiculous skeletons grin at us to-day from the show-cases of those museums which are possessed of sufficient floor-space for such an exhibition went through a similar development.

They increased their size and strengthened their armaments until they could neither walk nor swim and were doomed to wade through the mud and slime of those endless marshlands which during that period of the earth's history covered so great a part of the world and which offered no more substantial fare than reeds and seaweeds.

Then when a change in the climate occurred(and sudden and violent changes in climate were more apt to occur then than they are now, owing to a more equitable division of oceans and continents at the present moment),these slow-witted monsters could turn neither to the sea nor to the land in search of a new means of support. And so they were doomed to perish in such a thoroughgoing and efficient manner that of all the countless billions of saurians, which for so many millions of years were the undisputed masters of our planet, not a single one lived to see the coming of the great mammals and the final appearance of man.

That is the story as it is usually told, but I wonder whether it is the whole of the story—whether there is not another angle from which we have never looked at it and which is quite as important as any of the usual excuses for their untimely demise.

Climatic changes no doubt exercise a very important influence upon the comfort and happiness of all living creatures, from microbes to mules.

But climatic changes, unless they are so terrific that they amount to absolute catastrophes(like those that seem to have followed in the wake of the extinction of our former moons),need not always be fatal. Indeed, they have much in common with financial crises, In both cases, those who are unprepared perish.

But those who have taken measures to protect themselves against sudden emergencies can stand the strain and survive.

And this remark offers me an excellent opportunity to introduce the real hero of our story and refrain from further philosophizing, which is pleasant for the author but rather hard on the reader.

Alas!when the creature made its first appearance, it didn't look the least little bit like a hero, but very much like one of the baboons or chimpanzees or orang-outangs which regard us in such a melancholic fashion from behind the iron bars of the Zoo.

I do not mean to imply that the human race has descended directly from one of these man-like apes or that human beings are merely gorillas who have done rather well in the world and who have reason to feel slightly ashamed of their unfortunate grandparents. That would make the matter of descent altogether too simple.

But according to the hest of our information, millions of years ago the chimpanzees and orang-outangs and baboons and we ourselves possessed one common ancestor. One part of the family evolved into something a little higher and finer and sometimes even a little nobler, while other branches contented themselves with remaining exactly what they had been in the days of the mammoth and the cave-bear, great big shambling creatures who live in the murky tenements of primeval forests or who are caught and put into cages to be shown to their gaping cousins of the big cities as a dreadful warning of the fate that awaits those who are too lazy or too incompetent or too dull to make the best of their opportunities.

As for the actual process of change which elevated man from the undignified position of a long-tailed quadruped, at the mercy of almost every one of its better armed neighbors, to the dignity of the tailless, two-footed master of the universe, there once more it is such a short time since we have been allowed to study that subject scientifically without running the risk of being burned at the stake for our troublesome curiosity that we are still profoundly ignorant about many of the most important details of this marvelous metamorphosis.

All the same, a sufficient amount of work has been done to make it possible for us to get at least a general idea of what happened when our great-great-grandparents took their courage into both their recently acquired hands and decided to break away from the dull routine of mere animal existence.

The period during which our ape-like ancestors came for the first time into international prominence was an era of a warm and even climate when there was more water on the earth than there is to-day and when small stretches of dry land, densely covered with forests, took the place of our present continents. These forests were inhabited by diverse tribes of a common simian origin.They were tree-dwellers and marvelous acrobats.For their safety depended entirely upon their ability to leap vast distances without the slightest degree of error.Even if it were not exactly necessary for them to be nimble-witted, they were forced to be more so that their heavier armed enemies or he eaten by the latter.

Now if all had gone well and the world had remained as it was(which to the great horror of many honest people it never does)there is no reason why the simian race should not ultimately have inherited the earth and have become the undisputed rulers of this planet, as the gigantic reptiles and the gigantic mammals had been before them.

But some ten million years ago the earth seems to have suffered another change. As a result of this the waters receded somewhat and the land increased in size, while the general temperature of the world became slightly lower and the air became less moist.In consequence whereof, conditions became less favorable for vegetable life and soon(that is to say, after the inevitable hundreds of thousands of years)vast stretches of land which since time immemorial had been covered with forests began to show occasional gaps.And finally the woods shrank until they had become mere little islands of trees, surrounded on all sides by grass-covered plains and snow-covered mountains.

It was then that our own ancestors had their chance.

Whereas until that moment they had been able to make an easy living, moving rapidly from one part of the endless forests to another, they now found themselves deprived of their old means of locomotion and were as helpless as railroad trains without tracks.

To make conditions worse, the ever increasing height of the mountain ridges was beginning to raise a series of barriers which divided the world into definite terrestrial compartments from which there was no escape except for the birds and a few of the hardier varieties of insects and butterflies.

Under these conditions the law of the survival of the fittest began to operate with very remarkable results. By far the greater number of the ape-like creatures submitted to the inevitable.The more intelligent tribes, however, fought back.

And they fought back with the only means at their disposal.

They fought back with their brains.

It was then that our race passed through its most severe crisis and then that the future fate of mankind was decided for good and all.

It was then that the earliest ancestor of man turned inventor.

Now when we use the word“invention”in the modern sense, we think at once of flying machines and radios and complicated electric contrivances. But it is of quite a different sort of invention that I want to speak at the present moment.I want to tell you of those basic and elementary inventions which, curiously enough, only one sort of mammal seems ever to have been able to devise and which gave that particular species a chance not only to go on living when most of the others died, but furthermore to claim for itself and its descendants a position of such absolute preminence that nothing will ever be able to shake it unless man, in his folly and greed, continues his present policy of violence and warfare and allows himself to be eaten out of house and home by some particularly industrious mad prolific family of insects—while he himself is engaged in the usual pursuit of murdering his neighbors.

Right here of course one might interrupt me with the questions,“How about the inventive power of animals?Haven't the birds and the wasps and the ants and some of the fishes invented nests?Haven't the beavers become veritable architects mad learned to build dams that are as efficient as anything made by human hands?Don't spiders construct all sorts of hunting apparatus that are the terror of their prey?What about the traps many of the insects dig to capture their prey?”And so on and so forth.

To which I could only answer yes. The business of inventing is not exclusively restricted to that part of the animal kingdom which is known as Man.Several of his rivals have also“invented”things.But there is a vast difference between the inventions of ordinary animals and those of our own species.

The ordinary animals have never originated more than a single new idea. That one effort seems to have exhausted their imaginative powers.Thereafter they merely repeated themselves in an absolutely monotonous and mechanical fashion.

The nests and webs and dams they are building in the year of grace 1928 are not different from the nests and webs and dams they made in the year 192,800,000 B. C.If we allow them to survive, which is doubtful, they will still be building the same nests and webs and dams 192,800,000 years hence.For their so-called inventions are merely part of their daily quest for food, as is shown by the fact that those same animals, in a state of captivity, cease almost immediately to construct anything at all and happily live upon the fare which is provided for them by their keepers.Whereas man seems to have realized at a very early moment that there was something more to life than the mere business of getting enough to cat and to drink;that he could not hope to devote himself to matters of the spirit without a great deal of leisure;that this leisure could be achieved only by freedom from toil and drudgery;that this freedom from toil and drudgery could be accomplished only by an endless variety of“inventions”which had to be based upon the unlimited multiplication and extension of those few and slender powers with which nature had endowed him at the time of his birth.

That is a pretty big sentence, but it is the last of the big sentences in this book, and, furthermore, it has got to be a big one. One cannot discuss the problems that lie at the very root of existence as if one were talking about the weather or the coming elections.It takes big words to explain big ideas.But once you understand what I am trying to say on this page, you will understand everything else in the present book and so it won't do you any harm to reread the last hundred words a couple of times.

The human race, as we know it at present, started with one enormous initial advantage. Its ancestors, through their mode of living among the branches of the trees, had been obliged to develop a high degree of mental alertness and quickness of decision long before any of the other animals had been placed in a similar desperate position.With those others, brute force had been pitched against brute force.With the apes it had been a question of nimble fingers and even nimbler minds, holding their own against claws and beaks that could break a tree into splinters.

When through the disappearance of their former haunts these creatures had suddenly been forced to change their mode of existence, they had already accumulated such terrific versatility in the use of their hands and feet that it was comparatively easy for them to use their hind-legs for the purpose of standing upright, while their fore-feet supported their bodies among the low shrubs and the high reeds through which they must now begin to move in quest of food.

When finally they found themselves almost completely deprived of their verdant bungalows and were forced to dwell entirely in the plains, they were no longer a mere tribe of treedwelling animals but a strange new sort of creature which was rapidly learning the incredibly difficult art of walking on its hind-legs without any support whatsoever and which was therefore able to relieve its fore-paws from all further duties as auxiliary engines of locomotion and could use them entirely for a number of purposes, like“holding”and“carrying”and“tearing”,which thus far had been performed in a clumsy and most unsatisfactory fashion by the teeth of their powerful jaws.

That was the first step along the road of progress and it was directly responsible for the second one, to which the bulk of this book is devoted, and which consisted in that gradual process of multiplication of the powers of our feet and hands and eyes and ears and mouth, and in strengthening the endurance of our skin, through which we have attained our present superior position in the animal kingdom and which has made us the undisputed rulers of the star that serves us both as a home and as a prison.

But that was not all. At the very moment when our ancestors were rudely put before the choice of remaining what they were and perishing, or becoming something a little better and surviving, nature came to their aid.For not only did the climate change sufficiently to bring about a shrinkage of the forests, but the lessening of the available water supply and the increasing height of the mountain ranges(and mayhap some other reasons which we have not yet discovered)caused such a sudden decline in the general temperature of the earth that another of those so-called“glacial periods”took place, which ere then at regular intervals had covered the greater part of both the northern and the southern hemisphere with thick sheets of ice and snow and had forced all plants and animals to withdraw to a comparatively narrow strip of land along both sides of the equator.

It is a fact quite often overlooked in our modern times(when work hasbecome almost the sole relief of the boredom created by a purely mechanicalcivilization)that everything that exists is innately lazy. Since it is the businessof living matter to go on living, it will make very.great efforts to survive.But once this primary duty has been attended to, there is not a plant nor an animal nor even a piece of coral which does not greatly prefer peace and quiet to activity and bustle.No lion or tree or shrimp ever works when he or she or it can enjoy the agreeable joys of doing nothing at all.And man too would never have achieved his present great victories if he had not been spurred into action by the brutal necessities that were inevitably associated with those endless periods of time when only one-eighth of the surface of the earth was inhabitable.

Never before or afterwards has man made such enormous strides in every field of development as during those ghastly stretches of time when glaciers crept down upon him from all sides, when the summers had shrunk to a mere handful of days, when all the land from the North Pole to the Alps was one vast icefield.

We bear a great deal about that proverbial“school of hard knocks”which is supposed to be the best of all possible institutions of learning. To judge, however, by the results, the“school of the glaciers”was the most thoroughgoing training-school which the human race ever attended.

Article I of its icy curriculum read:“Thou shalt either use thy brain to the utmost possibility of its development, or thou shalt perish.”

Our ancestors of those long forgotten days were low-browed brutes, evil-smelling savages, creatures that were very little different from most of their animal neighbors. But we can forgive them a great deal when we remember that they had the courage to take up the uneven battle against nature and were willing to fight it out to a victorious finish against odds that nowadays would seem hopeless.

And how they did this by the very simple process of multiplying to an almost unlimited degree the powers that lay dormant in their hands and feet and eyes—that I shall now try to tell you.

Chapter 2

From Skin to Sky-Scraper

All inventions that have ever been made serve the general purpose ofassisting man in his praiseworthy effort to pass through life with a maximum of pleasure in exchange for a minimum of effort.

But some of them are merely multiplications(or extensions or intensifications or augmentations)of certain physical attributes, such as“speaking”or“walking”or“‘throwing”or“‘listening”or“looking,”while others are the result of man's desire to keep his body and his faculties in decent comfort and repair.

The division which I here offer is a very loose one. Many of the inventions overlap.But the same is true of all attempts at scientific classification.Nature herself is hopelessly complicated and man happens to be the most complicated of all her achievements.As a result, everything connected with man or his desires or his accomplishments is a vast mass of the most extravagant contradictions.

I feel it my duty to tell you this, for if you happen to be a thoroughgoing classification fan, you will discover a great many things in this book which will irritate you most terribly and you had better exchange it for a handbook of botany or a couple of time-tables. All of which are guaranteed to be without error or exaggeration.

For example, take the inventions connected with man's skin. Do they belong to the first division—to the inventions which are connected with survival—or to the second one(which I hope to write about afterwards)—to the inventions connected with“maintenance and repair”?I really don't know, hut I have decided to include them in the present volume.Nowadays we take them so absolutely for granted that it would seem as if they belonged in the second department and served no other purpose than that of“maintenance.”But in the beginning they had more to do with keeping men from becoming a defunct species of animal than almost any other agency.And so I shall include them here.

And here goes!

Ever since the beginning of time, animals had gone about ha a state of complete nakedness. However much they had suffered from the cold, none of them had ever thought of protecting itself against snow and icy blasts by renforcing its own skin with a layer of artificial heat, provided by the skin of one of its departed brethren.They sometimes sought the shelter of a rock during a blizzard or a hailstorm, but that was quite as far as they went.

The idea of putting on a coat when it is cold seems so incredibly simple that we can hardly imagine a time when man had not yet learned that one could assure one's body against sudden changes of temperature by coveting it with a layer of animal or vegetable matter, either in the form of the skin of a dead animal or in that of a woolen blanket or a linen coat or a mantle woven out of the grass or the leaves of a plant or tree.

But you will notice throughout this book that very often the least complicated innovations were the last ones to be thought of and that it took an enormous amount of perseverance and ingenuity on the part of hundreds of thousands of bright people to evolve even the simplest of simple devices and carry them to a practical solution.

Of course we never know the names of those true pioneers of progress. But there must have been some one who was the“first”to venture forth clad in the hide of a cow or the pelt of a bear, just as in our own times there was one“first”person to tolk into a telephone and a“first”person to listen to the first weak sounds of a written telegram.And I feel convinced that the“first”man to appear in an overcoat caused a great deal more commotion than the first man who drove down Fifth Avenue in a horseless carriage.

Very likely he was mobbed.

Even more likely he was killed as a dangerous sorcerer who tried to interfere with the will of the gods who on the day of creation had decided that man should ever suffer from cold when it was winter and from heat when it was summer.

Skins, however, must have been galore in a world that rived by hunting and the new invention had come to stay, as you may see for yourself by looking out of your window.

But the ordinary skins of ordinary dead animals suffered from several disadvantages. In the first place, they were terribly smelly, as prehistoric man had no way of preparing them except by letting them dry in the sun.The stench, however, can't have meant very much to people used to spending their days and nights among the decaying remnants of all their previous meals.But they were apt to crack and they did not fit the form of the body very well, in consequence whereof they were full of draughts and of no earthly use in a storm or a blizzard.And so the Inquisitive Ones(the only people who have ever done anything worth mentioning for the human race)said to themselves:“So far, so good, but can't we find a more comfortable substitute for our substitute-skins?”and they set to work and produced a number of“just-as-good”articles which have played a tremendous rle in the history of human progress.I refer to those products which we know by the names of cotton, wool, linen and silk, all of which seem to have come to us from Asia.

Perhaps you will object that the word“‘seem”occurs a little too frequently in these pages to make you feel that I have the slightest scientific confidence in the statements I am making. Well, you would not be so very far wrong.I am like a person trying to solve an intricate puzzle in a dark room.Up to fifty or sixty years ago, we did not even know that there was such a thing as prehistoric history.We said:“Civilization begins with Abraham leaving the land of Ur,”or if we were very audacious, we went 2000 years further back and boldly proclaimed:“Civilization begins with the Egyptians and the Babylonians.”

We knew, of course, that Chinese history was a great deal more ancient than that of western Asia and northern Africa, but the Chinese were heathen and lived far away and therefore we rarely bothered about them unless we happened to write about the Opium War or the sack of Peking by the Allies, when we gave them half a preliminary page.

Gradually, however, a few people reached the conclusion that this idea of making history start on a definite day in. the year 4000+B.C.or the year 2000+B.C.was a little absurd—just a little childish.And they began to dig among the rubbish heaps of Denmark and they lit an occasional candle in the caves of southern France and northern Spain and they took care that the queer statues and the broken skulls that were found in the soil of Austria and Germany were no longer sold to the junk man.Until they found themselves possessed of so much and such highly interesting material that they were forced to confess that those cordially despised ancestors of the glacial age had not been quite such ignorant brutes as had always been supposed and that the much vaunted civilization of the Egyptians and the Babylonians had been merely a continuation of certain forms of culture which had been devised by still other tribes of which every trace had been lost thousands of years before the building of the pyramids.

To-day if it is true(as some learned professors claim)that we have discovered the key to the mysterious inscriptions that were found in and around the caves of southern France, we can extend the period of recorded history by at least 10,000 years and instead of speaking of fifty centuries of human progress, we ought to speak of one hundred and fifty centuries.

But once more I must warn you that this whole field of knowledge is practically unexplored and that we know as little about the state of Europe or Asia in the year 15,000 B. C.as we know about the bottom of the ocean.No sensible person, however, but feels that a perfect knowledge of the bottom of the ocean is merely a question of time;and the same holds tune for the so-called prehistoric era.Give us plenty of serious investigators and a few years of peace(bombs mad shells are not the best things in the world for hidden treasure-rooms filled with earthen pots and pans)and we shall surely possess as much information about the people of the last glacial period as we now have about the subjects of King Tiglath-pileser.

For example, we know from certain prehistoric pictures(and some of our remote ancestors were remarkable artists)that man used to clothe himself in the dried skins of dead animals. But at what precise period he changed his crudely prepared skins into regular leather, that is something upon which we have no definite information but which we can find quite easily by using a little common sense and by inspecting the circumstantial evidence that is at our disposal.

Hides are changed into leather through a process which we call“tanning.”“Tanning,”according to the dictionary,“is a process through which we are able to convert raw hides into leather by soaking them in liquids containing tannic acids or by the use of mineral salts.”

The next question is:“Who were the people of ancient times who knew most about‘converting raw hides into leather by the use of mineral salts'?”and the answer is:“The Egyptians, whose religious convictions obliged them to preserve the bodies of their dead for the greatest possible time and who therefore perfected the art of embalming long before any of their neighbors had ever even thought of such a possibility.”

And when we go to the valley of the Nile, we find as a matter of fact that the Egyptians were expert leather workers centuries before any of the other nations of the ancient world and that the shoemaker's shop(which for all the world looked like one of those quick repair establishments which are so popular in our modern cities)was one of the earliest of the pictures that appeared inside the tombs of defunct Theban kings.

From Egypt the tanner's art then spread to Greece. But the Greeks were people of a delicate taste, and philosophers can discuss the problems of existence just as comfortably and even more comfortably in a woolen tunic than in a leather jerkin.Wherefore the leather industry never made much progress in that land and hastened to Rome, where every other man was a soldier who needed stout sandals and helmet straps and cuirasses, all of which had to be made out of the hides of cows and sheep, duly prepared to withstand the heat of the Sahara and the dampness of Scotland.

In the meantime, in the same land of Egypt, several other skin-substitutes had been carried to a high degree of perfection. In the valley of the Nile, as well as in the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, people were more in need of protection against the heat than of protection against the cold.Hence at a very early age they tried to find a cooler sort of garment then the skin of a donkey or a goat.And after thousands of years of experiments with different sorts of grass and the leaves of trees, woven into all sorts of garments, they came to the conclusion that the stalk of Linum usitatissimum, which we call“flax,”was best suited for the purpose of future textile experiments.

It seems to be the usual opinion that one-half of the world lived in complete ignorance of what the other half was doing before the introduction of the telegraph and the modern newspaper. The contrary is true.Both the telegraph and the newspaper serve quite as much as means for the propagation of erroneous information as for the spread of reliable news.A hundred centuries ago such highly interesting items as what leading cave-dwellers of the Dordogne had eaten for supper night before last, or what the lake people of Switzerland intended to wear as their fall costumes would hardly have found their way to the tents of the mammoth-hunters of lower Siberia.But whenever anything of real importance happened, whenever a new invention had made its appearance, that increased man's power over nature, it seems that the Chinese knew about it almost as soon as the Cretans or the people of the Atlantic seaboard.I do not mean to imply that all those who heard the news made equally good use of the information.No more than we do today.Indifference and ignorance, but mostly the fear of the unknown, have ever been the enemies of reasonable progress.But that inventions(if they appealed to everybody's interest)could spread with surprising celerity is a fact which the evidence of caves and graves bears out beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Otherwise we should not have found evidences of flax culture along the shores of the Swiss lakes at the same time that it was being grown in the valley of the Nile, for the two places were at different ends of the inhabitable world. But when and where this plant was first raised, that again is one of those things which we shall never be able to find out, and tile same holds true for cotton, of which we first hear in Persia and a few years later in Mesopotamia.

According to Herodotus, cotton had come originally from India, but the planting of the crop and the harvesting had been too complicated to let it attain the popularity of either flax or wool as a suitable material for the manufacture of substitute skins for the masses. This sounds familiar to modern ears, but then the problem is as old as the hills and dates back to the latter half of the Stone Age.

In the beginning“mass production”had hardly been necessary. During the glacial periods people had been forever on the move.Their diet and the conditions under which they lived were worse than those of the poorest slum-dwellers of the year 1928.The majority of the bones we have found in caves mad river beds show signs of those uncomfortable diseases which are inevitable when people sleep in damp quarters and which drag their victims to the grave long before they have reached the age of forty.

Infant mortality seems to have been as high as it was in Russia during the days of the Tsars—a little over 50 per cent. An unusually long or cold winter would depopulate whole countrysides, as it does to-day among the Esqulmaux and some of the Indians of northern Canada.The number of people alive at the same time therefore remained very small;but with the opening up of the large granaries of the Nile and the Euphrates, all tiffs changed.Then at last man could breed at will and large accumulations of human beings could inhabit the same spot.Cities began to develop and the inhabitants of those cities had to be provided with a form of clothing that should at once be cheap and plentiful.

The woolen industry was the answer. Credit for the first woolen garment should undoubtedly go to the peasant who first realized the possibilities of domesticating the doleful creatures which the Romans called“ovis”and which we call“sheep.”This first shepherd must have lived somewhere among the mountains of central Asia.For it was from Turkestan that the wool industry spread westward until by way of Greece and Rome it reached the British Isles, which for over a thousand years were to remain the greatest wool-raising center of the world and were to use this article of export as an economic shillelagh with which to threaten all their neighbors into submission.

For all the rest of the world(and for a long time after its discovery, even the people of America)depended for its supply of raw woolens upon the favor of England. The English knew this and made as shrewd a use of their monopoly as any other country that has its neighbors at its mercy for some staple product of consumption.

The medival ballads and sagas are full of sentimental references to spinning and weaving, but they should not close our eyes to the fact that the innocent though fleecy lamb has caused quite as much blood to be spilled as half a hundred diamond mines or oil wells.

In this particular wool had a very different record from another substitute for the skin which was of even more modest origin. I mean the silk spun by a miserable worm with the grandiloquent name of Bombyx mori.

The appearance of some substance like silk upon the markets of that part of the world devoted to Vanity Fair was, of course, unavoidable. For man not only is a lazy creature but also is incredibly vain.What would be the use of having money in one's purse if one could not provoke the envy of the neighbors by a display of rich and rare apparel?When all the world goes forth dressed in linen and woolens, there is not much fun in belonging to the woolen-brigade oneself.No, the poor rich were sadly pressed and had to choose between discovering a new but expensive way of keeping themselves warm or going about without any clothes at all.

At that very moment the Chinese insect came to their rescue, for in those ancient days its product was worth its weight in gold.

Bomyx mori hailed from Asia. His cradle stood in the far eastern corner of Asia and to the Chinese belongs the honor of having been the first to recognize his eminent services to the cause of beauty and civilization.They were so proud of their discovery that they declared it to be of divine origin and according to tradition, no one less than the lovely Si-lung, the wife of the famous emperor Huang-ti(who lived more than a thousand years before Moses)was the first to make a scientific study of the famous little creeping creatures whose tiny glands eject almost a thousand yards of silken thread when the time has come for them to retire into the privacy of their cocoons.

And so delighted were the sons of Han with the labors of their beloved empress that they decided to keep the manufacture of silk a holy secret. In this they were successful for more than twenty centuries.Then the Japanese sent a delegation of Korean traders to the Holy Empire who induced a few Chinesegirls to come to Japan and teach their cousins the noble art of silk weaving.

A short time afterwards a Chinese princess, hiding the seed of the mulberry tree and the eggs of Bombyx mori in her silken headdress, smuggled the precious treasure out of China mad carried it to India. From there began its victorious westward voyage.

The inevitable Alexander the Great seems to have heard of it during his famous eastern campaign. The equally inevitable Aristotle mentions the worm.A few centuries afterwards those Roman ladies of fashion, whose husbands could afford this smart luxury, always wore silk.

But silk remained almost as rare as platinum is to-day until the end of the sixth century of our era, when two Persian monks were able to smuggle a small colony of silkworms, carefully hidden in a bamboo tube, past the Chinese frontier guard. They carried their contraband in triumph to the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople and that city then became the center of the European silk trade.

When the Crusaders plundered that holy site, they filled their trunks with hales of stolen silk and in this way, almost thirty centuries after its invention by the Chinese, the silk industry was introduced into the western half of Europe. Even then silk remained a great luxury and it was a matter of pride for a Burgundian prince that his daughter's dowry contained“a pair of real silk stockings”and even 600 years later, a silly and vain woman like the Empress Josephine could Practically ruin her husband by the large number of silk hose which she saw fit to order while he had gone forth to conquer Europe.

This situation was bound to come to an end when every woman began to feel that she, too, bad the right to dress herself like the wife of the Emperor of the French. From that moment on there were not enough silkworms on the whole of the planet to supply the demand of the new industrial democracy.The ever obliging chemists were then called upon to fill the void.They set to work and soon favored us with an artificial form of silk which was made out of the same substance as our modern paper.It was rather terrible stuff and it would not last.But in an age of quick turn-over that worried very few people and nowadays women go about dressed becomingly in garments made out of wood.So much for the different materials which were used as substitutes for the cowhide of our earliest ancestors.These materials have varied greatly, in cost and in texture and in art, but it is a curious fact that the basic idea underlying our wearing apparel has not changed at all since the day when the first man robbed a horse of its skin and used it for the purpose of making his own hide feel more comfortable.

Recently, however, the terrific extreme of cold to which aviators who fly at high altitudes are exposed, has led to the invention of“flying suits”which are kept at an even temperature with the help of a small electric battery.

The invention of even smaller batteries, which can be carried in our vest-pockets, will probably revolutionize the clothing industry before the end of another fifty years. Then, instead of borrowing each other's overcoats, we shall drop in at the house of a friend to ask him to let us recharge our battery, while we smoke a cigarette before his electric grate.

To-day that sounds slightly absurd, but I am not a very old man and yet, when I was young, we would have roared with laughter if some one had suggested that in the year of our Lord 1928 every citizen would be racing around in his own little private locomotive. And so why not expect a coatless age that shall save us from carrying an extra burden of cowhide or coonskin and shall do away with the insufferable nuisance of the cloak-room brigands?

A pious wish.

May it soon come true!

And now for another invention which is also closely connected with man's desire to increase the power of resistance of his own skin, but an invention of quite a different sort.

It would be easy to say that this, too, had been the result of an attempt to protect the human body against heat and cold, but this would not be entirely true. Other elements entered into the making of that curious substitute for the skin which we call a house.Chief among those influences was the habit of all mammals to care for their young for a longer period of time than any of the other animals.For this purpose they needed a safe spot where the whole family could be kept together for two or three months and where they could be taught the rudiments of their papa's and mamma's profession until they were old enough and big enough to set up in business for themselves.

At first they found desirable quarters ha hollow trees or inside those caves that had been formed through the action of the water and had become free for occupancy when the oceans receded and the rivers were confined to narrow beds that lay from thirty to forty feet below their ancient levels.

But these primitive homes were not very attractive. They were filled with millions of bats, for daylight rarely penetrated into these dark grottoes.What was much worse, saber-toothed tigers and gigantic bears, belonging to a species now extinct, also considered themselves extremely desirable tenants and the mixtures of human skeletons and animal bones which we find deep in the gray dust of those cavities tell grewsome stories of the desperate battles that were then fought for a dwelling-place in which to-day we would hardly stable our pigs.

Caves, therefore, did not remain popular very long. A few of them were retained as places of worship, but the vast majority were given up as homes just as soon as some one had discovered how to make himself a substitute cave, or, as we would now say, just as soon as he had built himself a“house.”

In his subsequent search for protection from cold and heat, man has devised some exceedingly strange contraptions. In one part of the world he has constructed houses out of square blocks of ice.In other parts he has woven his shelter out of the branches of trees and has covered them with grass and with leaves.

The most primitive house of all was the lean-to. It has survived as a makeshift for hunters suddenly overcome by nightfall, and as the only place of residence of certain of the least civilized natives of South America and Australia.

Next came the houses made out of baked mud and covered with straw. Then the house with the rough wooden frame.This developed into the so-called pile-dwelling of which we have found remains in many parts of the world, and which is still in common use in certain tropical regions well provided with lakes and rivers.

It used to be thought that these houses on stilts had been constructed mainly for the purpose of safety. But there was another consideration which made people take to the water.One of the first evidences of a beginning sense of decency(which really means a beginning sense of civilization)is a desire for the cleanliness of one's own person and of one's clothes and immediate surroundings.Europe is apt to laugh at us in America for our insistence upon bathrooms and sewers, and perhaps we sometimes overdo the business a little.Athens was no mean city, although the pigs in the streets were also the garbage collectors, and medival Paris made certain very definite contributions to knowledge and art without wasting much time or money upon the problems of sanitation.Nevertheless, other things being equal, it is more agreeable to live in a country that prides itself upon its neat back yards then in a region where family and fertilizer dwell happily together underneath one and the same roof.

People seem to have known this 20,000 years ago as well as they do to-day and those who were more squeamish than the others began to build their houses fifty or a hundred feet from the shore. The roof overhead protected the lodgers against the sun and the rain, while the waters underneath acted as a dump-heap and the little fishes played the rle of White Wings—a truly ideal combination.

This was a great improvement upon what had gone before, but people were still forced to share the same barracks for the sake of greater safety. However, as the problem of survival had become a little less urgent, they took a second step forward and discovered the charm mad the spiritual advantages of privacy.

For privacy is one of the greatest of all human goods, hut unfortunately it comes high. It is a luxury which only the very rich can afford.Nevertheless, the moment a family or a nation has reached a certain point of well-being, it immediately clamors for the sovereign right to be alone.And that is the way individual houses came to be built.

During such periods of affluence, people would no more think of sharing each other's homes than we would think of sharing each other's overcoats or toothbrushes. Now and then, as in ancient Rome, whenever too many slaves had gathered together on too small a spot, the inevitable tenement houses made their appearance.But the people who crowded together in the dark dungeons which the Romans thought good enough for the poor peasants who had come to the big city in the hope that there they would be less miserable than on their war-stricken farms, never liked those suffocating barracks and never took root ha the slums.Just as soon as they could, they went back to the“onefamily house.”

During the Middle Ages in certain parts of Europe the respect for a man's living quarters became so great that“My house is my castle”was more than a mere phrase. It was a political program and stood writ into more than one Great Charter.

But our own modern times, by erecting vast workshops near the mouths of convenient coal mines or along the banks of profitable harbors, have forced the people to return to the mode of living that was originally practiced by the cave-dwellers but was given up by them as unworthy of decent human beings. As a result, the big cities of the West have become gigantic accumulations of artificial skins, piled one on top of another without the slightest respect for the sacred right of privacy of the individual and offering the average citizen as much seclusion as that enjoyed by a sardine.

Fortunately a great change is coming over the world. Everywhere people are in open rebellion against the degradation of the human ant-heap.Most families are still too poor to afford more than a couple of rooms in a stone or wooden five-decker, and they must share their sleeping and eating quarters with several hundred perpendicular neighbors.But those who can do so have developed a novel scheme of living which is vastly superior to that of their grandparents and which makes them the equals of certain sorts of birds.They migrate.They have two sorts of shelter.One is located in semi-tropical regions where they can spend the winters, duly protected against the rigors of the north wind.The other is built amidst the forests of the North, where they can escape from the sultry heat which during the summer months turns the sky-scraper-lined streets of our cities into thoroughfares of Hades.

At present it seems only a dream that some day practically all of mankind will be able to move up and down with the seasons. But in America that dream is fast becoming realized by an ever increasing number of people.

Ten thousand years from now it may appear to our descendants that we of the twentieth century, at least in the matter of mere living, were still contemporaries of the lake-dwellers and the cavemen and the ruins of New York and Chicago will convince them that those rubbish heaps of stone and steel were probably constructed during the latter half of the Stone Age.

It was one thing to find a shelter against the snow and the rain, but it was not quite so easy to keep those shelters warm.

Hence the invention of the house was closely followed by the invention of the fire as a means of keeping warm. Open fires, the original form of heating, have survived until our own day, but now they are used chiefly for ornamental purposes, for they are quite as uncomfortable in the year 1928 as they were in the days when they also served to prepare the daily dish of fried mammoth steak, burning one's toes and allowing one's back to freeze as unconcernedly as if there were no fire at all.

The crude ovens of some of the early Scandinavian tribes show that even then people were looking for something a little more practical than a mere log.

Unfortunately, the Egyptians and the Babylonians, the most intelligent among the ancient inventors, lived in such agreeable climates that they did not have to bother about stoves. But the Greeks, who, like sensible people, knew that high thinking cannot exist, together with uncomfortable living, seriously put their minds to the task of devising a more satisfactory method of heating and bethought themselves of hot air as a means of keeping their substitute skins at an even temperature.

The palace of Cnossos(the capital of Crete, which ruled the eastern part of the Mediterranean a thousand years before the birth of Christ)was provided with radiators. As for the Romans, who, like all true Mediterraneans, abhorred the cold, they arranged their houses in such a way that all the floors and the walls could he heated by means of a stove that stood outside the premises and was kept at full blast by a couple of slaves who acted as furnace-men and saw that there was a steady and even flow of hot air throughout the premises.

During the third and fourth and fifth centuries, however, when Europe was overrun by savages from the heart of Asia who had a deep contempt for what they called“softness”(the same“softness”that had kept them outside of Roman walls for more than 600 years),comfort—in the Greek and Roman sense of the word—disappeared from the face of the earth. The majority of the old Roman houses went to ruin.Temples were used as stables for horses and oxen.The former summer residences of Roman patricians were carted away to be turned into fortifications.Old theaters were transformed into miniature villages.And the radiator-systems of the senatorial villas were allowed to go to pieces.

With a return of law and order, people once more moved into houses of their own;but for more than a thousand years they either froze altogether or tried to keep their rooms warm with the help of braziers filled with charcoal, a method of heatlng which merely accentuated the cold and forced them to keep their hats and coats on even when they went to bed.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, conditions were almost as bad. It is very pleasant to read about the glories of the great Sun King.But we envy His Majesty a little less ardently when we realize that, although he was considered the richest and most powerful man of his time, the good king spent his days in a palace that could not possibly be kept warm, that the stewed fruit froze on his own dining-room table, and that his courtiers, when they decided to wash themselves(which was rarely),were obliged to attack the water pitcher with an ice pick.

Finally, as a supposed improvement upon the charcoal brazier, some one returned to the open fireplace which had already been old stuff in the glacial epoch. But this time it was provided with a chimney, a specially constructed shaft which was supposed to convey the smoke from the grate to the outer air by way of the roof.

At first the chimney was merely a hole in the wall itself, but at the beginning of the sixteenth century(after 300 years of experiment and failure)we hear at last of regular chimneys which looked like those we use to-day and which were capable of causing sufficient draught to take care of almost any fire.

Even then this method of keeping the substitute skin warm was far from satisfactory, and during the next ten generations both pauper and prince continued to choke and freeze in rooms which to-day could be kept comfortable by one or two fair-sized radiators.

Finally, during the last quarter of the last century, we returned to the ways of the Romans and once more learned how to keep our houses warm with the help of steam and hot air.

How long the present method of protecting our supplementary skin with the help of furnaces will last, I don't know, but probably not for very many more years.

The modern way of heating rooms by means of electricity is much simpler and much less cumbersome than the present system, which presupposes the existence of a more or less complicated hot-air apparatus in the basement and calls for a horde of janitors and truck drivers.

At present the problem is merely a matter of cost. As soon as we shall have invented a way to make electricity a great deal more plentiful and a great deal less expensive than it is today, we shall be able to do away with the coal man and the furnace man and the snorting oil heater and the smelly oil stove and the unsafe gas stove.Thereafter the mere turning of a For switch will keep our houses and churches and our public buildings at an even temperature, both summer and winter.

But before I finish this chapter, I must say a few words about another invention which is intimately connected with the business of keeping warm. I mean the holy art of making fire.

The first fires which man used to warm himself were undoubtedly stolen from a tree which had been hit by lightning. But forest fires do not last forever.And they rarely occur in the middle of the winter, when the demand for protection is at its highest.

Then some bright genius(all honor to his memory!he probably was a priest entrusted with the sacred fire upon which the lives of the community depended)discovered that friction would cause heat. It must have happened very long ago, for when man at last appears upon the historical stage, he already knew how to make fire by means of rotating a stick rapidly through a narrow groove cut into a second piece of wood.

A little later, when people commenced to manufacture stone implements, they noticed that when two stones were violently hit together, they produced sparks which could be caught quite easily by a handful of dry moss, which would then start a small conflagration.

This humble instrument, consisting of a fire-stone and a piece of metal, has had a long life. It has been adapted for all sorts of purposes.It gave us the flintlock gun, and finally it gave us our matches.

The tinder-box, with which our grandpapas lighted their pipes, was a complicated affair and not at all handy when one was obliged to make a fire in a hurry. It was necessary to invent something a little more practical, and in every town of the old and the new world people were puttering with chemical substances that should do the job of the cumbersome finder-box.

During the latter halt of the seventeenth century, the first varieties of“Lucifers,”or light-bearers, were actually invented. They consisted of small bits of phosphorus which were struck with a stone until they ignited scraps of wood which had been soaked with sulphur and which were then used to light the stove.They were, however, very smelly and rather dangerous and so they never became popular.

But in the year 1827 an English druggist by the name of John Walker invented a“friction match”which would work without setting the house on fire. He called them“congreves”in honor of Sir William Congreve, the man who during the Napoleonic wars had gained great popularity as the father of the famous“war rockets”and who was a pioneer in the general field of fireworks.

Twenty years later a Swede by the name of Lundstrm, from Jnkping, found a way of reducing the size of the friction matches until they became the“pocket matches”—those little bits of red wood with yellow heads with which we have been familiar all our lives.

Conservative people of course fought the innovation with bitter violence, among other things upon the rather curious ground that the matches would facilitate the labors of secondstory men. But in the end, the matches won out and they remained triumphant until the Great War, when the prehistoric tinder-and-flint(in a new and handy combination)was once more revived for the benefit of our cigarette-smoking heroes.

A curious turn of the far-famed wheel of progress.

And an indirect compliment to our long-forgotten forefathers.

Chapter 3

The Taming Hand

“The human hand is really an ordinary fore-paw, such as anyquadruped has, which by developing a so-called“opposable”thumb has made it possible for the creatures possessed of such an instrument of prehension, to do a number of things which other animals not provided with similar“prehensile terminations”are obliged to perform with the help of their claws and their beaks or their teeth.

If this learned sentence does not make it quite clear to you what I am trying to say, just watch your cat or your dog the next time he is struggling with a bone. He seems to feel that his paws may be of some service to him.After he has used his mouth and his nose to grasp and push whatever he wants to move to another corner of the garden, you will notice how in a helpless sort of fashion he attempts to bring his fore-paws into action.

But alas!he has no thumb.

The cat and dog can use their fore-paws for the purpose of holding a bone down while they tear at it with their teeth. They can dig a hole with their fore-feet in which they can afterwards bury their treasure.But they can never get beyond a few clumsy motions, for although they have a“thumb”it is not“opposed”to the four fingers and as a result they are unable to grasp or to hold an object and can submit it only to a few very simple operations, all of which have to do with the business of satisfying the appetite.

The hand, therefore, is the most important natural tool which man has acquired, and it was through the million-fold multiplication and extension of its power that he was able to make himself the undisputed master of the world.

But here we meet with one of those difficulties of which this book is so full. How and when and why was man able to realize the possibilities of his fore-paws while his cousin the ape(who certainly was just as intelligent in his own way)never learned to renforce the radius of activity of any one of his four prehensile hands?

Take the question of using a stone for the purpose of increasing the hitting power of the hand. You will say,“That idea was so simple that it must have been self-evident.”But nothing in this world is quite so simple as to be self-evident.Some one has to think of it first—try it out—experiment with it until he is blue in the face and half dead from exhaustion or has succumbed under the sneers of his neighbors.

And for thousands of years man simply grabbed at his living food with his bare hands, held his prey with his bare hands, tore little beasts and birds apart with his bare hands and never for a moment thought that it might be possible to do otherwise.

Until one individual at last had the courage to say:“This can be done much better and more simply,”renforced the striking power of his hand with a stick or a stone, and gave us our first hammer.

That is as far as our information goes. Whether that first hammer was of wood or of granite, we do not know and we shall never be able to find out, for wood is a very perishable commodity, while stones will last forever unless they are crushed to bits by a twenty-ton truck or a high explosive shell.

The stones, therefore, are the sole witnesses to proclaim the patience and the intelligence of the people who were the true pioneers of the human race, but the wood is gone and tells no tales.

Of course the layman who visits a museum of prehistoric history is not very deeply impressed. The collection of prehistoric tools which is spread out before his slightly bewildered gaze looks for all the world like the pebbles his youngest son is apt to bring in from the roadside.

To the expert, on the other hand, these early hammers and axes and saws are quite as important and as interesting as an exhibition of motor cars from the earliest one-lunged flivver to the latest Rolls-Royce. For they represent quite as much hard work on the part of a vast number of people as the historical models of modern internal-combustion machines.

When man first discovered that he could multiply the strength of his hand by means of a stone, any stone would do;that is to say, any stone small enough to be grasped firmly by the five fingers of the hand, yet not too small to be effective when used as the means of crushing a nut or a skull or a bone filled with that great antediluvian delicacy, marrow.

Gradually he learned that by chipping and flattening little bits off the sides he could turn his hammer into something that would cut as well as crush. Then began the search for suitable sorts of stone that would chip without breaking.At last they were found.Then some one discovered that by rubbing the sides of his hammer against other and harder pieces of stone, the edges could be polished and then the hanmer became a knife.

A few centuries later, when people had also learned that small strips of the dried skin of a dead animal could be used for the purpose of tying things together, some one fastened his stone knife to a wooden handle and gave us the battle ax, an infinitely more effective weapon than the original“fist-hammer”and a much more dangerous implement of war.

As for the smaller bits of stone with sharpened edges, they were the direct ancestors of our modern knives, our pocket knives and our saws. The saw, which is a most cunningly devised implement for increasing the tearing power of the bare hand, finally gave up its oblong shape, became a round disc and developed into that whining circular contrivance which tears through logs as if they were so much butter and which goes after iron and steel as unconcernedly as if those materials were tissue paper.A hammer is no doubt a very useful tool, but our whole modern industrial development would have been impossible without the augmented hand known as the saw.

As for another little grandchild of the flint-knife, our scissors, it is of much more recent origin, for despite its apparent simplicity, it is really rather complicated.

The Egyptian mummy-makers who possessed elaborate instrument chests seem to have done without scissors entirely. Later on, the Greeks and the Romans devised a sort of shears with which they clipped the hedges of their gardens and with which they finally sheared their sheep, whose wool thus far had been plucked from the backs of the unfortunate animals.Out of these Roman shears our modern scissors developed, and they are really a couple of knives with loops instead of handles and held together by a small pivot, as you may see for yourself the next time your hand needs some assistance in tearing up a piece of cardboard.

So far, so good. But the story of man's ingenuity in multiplying the strength of his organs is, alas, not only a chronicle of progress.

The Gods who rule this universe undoubtedly gave us the faculty to distinguish clearly between that which is good and that which is evil. But they decided to let us make our own choice and therefore bestowed upon us that irritating spiritual quality which our grandparents, who took a more serious interest in theological problems than we do, called the“free will.”It is the terrible“free will”which permits us to use our inventive power for evil quite as often as for good.And, being a strange mixture of contradictions, the average human being is just as apt to employ his brains for the purpose of devising a bomb as a ballad.

The knife which was born out of the most primitive of all necessities, the need of keeping alive in the midst of thousands of hostile forces, was immediately afterwards turned into an in strument of unnecessary violence. In the form of swords, sabers, bayonets, lance-points, arrow-heads, cutlasses, daggers, yataghans, claymores and scimitars it has made a triumphant procession around the world, slaying and hacking and cutting people to pieces for no other reason than that they possessed something which some one else wanted for himself or that they held certain ideas which others did not happen to share.

All of which is a great pity, but remember that human inventions are soulless creatures like the multiplication signs of our table of multiplication. Those little crosses do not care what they multiply.They would just as soon multiply-100,000 with-10,000 as+100,000 with+10,000.It happens to be their business to multiply things with each other.Beyond that they do not act and they do not care.They will multiply anything that is given to them and care not whether the outcome spells ruin or success.

It is very easy to talk about progress as if it were something automatic, something that was forever leading from worse to better, from low to high, from poor to rich. I wish that were true.But the path of progress is a steep and winding path that takes strange turns, and the“renforced hand”which has done so much to hack out that ancient highroad gave us not only the scissors with which the physician saves human life but also the grewsome contraption with which good Dr.Guillotin snuffed out the lives of his compatriots in such an expeditious and economical fashion.

This chapter begins to sound like a tract. I am sorry, but at the same time it is well to remember these things at the present moment, when a sudden deluge of mechanical perfections has given many people a dangerous feeling of ease and reassurance about the future of the human race.If all goes well with us, we may eventually amount to a great deal.But please do not overlook the fact that for every dollar the average nation spends upon its schools, it spends a hundred upon its battleships.And having planted that little mustard seed of wholesome doubt and worry in your mind, I shall now proceed to the next invention connected with the human hand, which is nothing more nor less than the agricultural implement called a spade.

The inventor of the spade probably was a woman. In the earliest agricultural communities of which we possess any record at all, men did not demean themselves with work in the fields, they left that to their wives and to their daughters and to their donkeys.I have no doubt that one fine day some poor, bedraggled female grew tired of breaking her nails while pulverizing the soil with her hands and picked up a stick or a stone and let it do the work of her fingers.

As the human race learned the use of bronze and iron and copper and steel, it was natural that those metals should be used to renforce the point of the stick, which was very breakable, and then by the gradual broadening and flattening of these pieces of metal we finally got a rudimentary form of a spade.

Of the hardships of these earliest workers in the picturesque but heart-and back-breaking realms of agriculture, only those who have seen the peasants of Egypt or Russia or northern Africa, hitched to a plow, can get a clear idea. An Arab plow(which is nothing but a slightly multiplied spade)looks very interesting in a museum.But the modern steam plow, doing the work of a thousand hands at the same time, is a much more agreeable sight to modern eyes, which are willing to forego a certain amount of romanticism if they are no longer forced to watch their fellow creatures being, used as beasts of burden.

Perhaps the term“modern eyes”is not quite correct.“Human eyes”would be a better expression, for the more intelligent and“humane”among men have always regarded unnecessary toil as an offensive nuisance. All through the ages we hear of inventions that were meant to relieve the workers of part of their burdens.Often the workers themselves had been so cowed by centuries of abuse that they fought those innovations, as birds born in captivity will struggle with those who are trying to set them free.Thus it could happen that those improvements which would have done away with endless hours of stupid drudgery remained mere blueprints in the desk of some forgotten scientific genius.

The fertile brain of the great Leonardo of the village of Vinci was an example in case. Leonardo was forever occupying himself with problems of such a sort, and the multiple hand which he proposed for the purpose of digging canals in the valley of the Po was never put into practice.It would undoubtedly have thrown a few people out of employment, but it would have made the lives of thousands of others infinitely more pleasant.But even those who were to be benefited could not see it that way and Leonardo was obliged to score another failure.He might have been more successful with his multiplied hand if he had tried to promote his machine in the Low Countries when the merchants began to clamor for a hand that would work beneath the surface of the water and commenced to experiment with dredges.But he lived in Italy and there the problem had never been a very serious one.The ships of ancient times had had so little depth that they could he parked almost anywhere.But during the latter half of the Middle Ages, especially along the shores of the North Sea, where rivers and tides played havoc with the harbors, it was necessary to think of some method by which the superfluous sand could be scooped up from the bottom of the rivers and bays.Dutch and English engineers then perfected the land dredge of their Italian colleague and provided floating, fiat-bottomed barges with spades that could dig under water.At present 90 per cent of all international commerce would come to an immediate standstill if those iron fingers which scrape the bottoms of our ports(sometimes at a depth of sixty feet)should go on strike for a single week.

The dredge, however, could do only one sort of job underneath the waters, and with the rapidly increasing importance of foreign trade, it was necessary to think of a method by which one could remove an entire carpenter and blacksmith shop to the river bed. But carpenter shops and blacksmith shops depend for their successful operation upon the presence of carpenters and blacksmiths.And both carpenters and blacksmiths, if they are to do any work at all, need a regular supply of fresh air.

It was possible, of course, for a good swimmer to dive for a couple of oysters(as the Greeks did during the siege of Troy)and to remain beneath the surface for 60 or 80 seconds. But when one was obliged to repair a hole in a ship or lift a heavy case of gold that had gone overboard during a storm, these short dips were of no earthly use.The lungs which served the hand had to be provided with an instrument that should guarantee them an uninterrupted flow of fresh air.

The first efforts made along that line consisted of a copper pipe which connected the mouth of the diver with the surface of the water. This, however, was only practical in shallow water.Gradually the copper tube was discarded for a leather pipe.the mouth of which remained afloat on the surface with the help of a pig's bladder.This leather pipe was the only diving apparatus which people could use for more than 2,000 years.At the end of the seventeenth century, however, an Italian had the bright idea of forcing air through this leather pipe with the help of a couple of ordinary bellows.The first experiments were successful.Ever since the under-water hand or diving machine has been steadily improved until to-day we are able to repair ships or fish for sponges at a depth of more than 180 feet, a terrific distance, as all those will appreciate who have ever tried to pick up a stone from the bottom of a pool.

But I am running a little ahead of my schedule and perhaps I had better first tell you of some other very primitive tools which were invented tens of thousands of years ago and also bore a tremendous influence upon the further development of human history.

For example, there was the lever. A lever is one of those simple contrivances of which people are apt to say that they are as old as the hills.It certainly has had more to do with changing the aspect of our landscape than anything else ever devised by the human hand.As a matter of fact, it is a very simple instrument, but without it neither the pyramids nor the dolmens nor any of the other prehistoric temples and graves consisting of gigantic bowlders and pieces of granite could possibly have been constructed.For the lever represented the infinite multiplication of the strength of the combined hand and arm and in its modified modern form it will lift up anything from a locomotive to a house and will do the work of a thousand hands at a cost of a few dollars.

Closely connected with the invention of the lever was the discovery that one could pull a much heavier load than one could carry and that all one needed for the latter purpose was a greatly elongated hand, or as we say to-day, a“rope.”

Whether the first rope was of hemp or of skin, I do not know. But as cotton and hemp were not introduced into the valley of the Nile and into Mesopotamia until a comparatively late date, the lariat made out of leather must be the older of the two.Even with the help of cords made out of the twisted fiber, the business of hoisting heavy materials to the top of a scaffold was a very painful operation for the hundreds of slaves that were doing the pulling.This hardship, however, was greatly lessened when the Babylonians, after years of experimenting(we can follow these experiments on their pictures)finally provided the human hand with a pulley(or block)which made it possible for one or two men to do as much as a hundred had done before.

The Greeks seem to have done most of their building with the simple assistance of levers and ropes and inclined planes, but the Romans, the architects of the ancient world, with their passion for roads and fortresses and bridges and harbor-works and aqueducts, greatly improved the pulley and gave it its present form. They even wrote books about the best ways of making blocks and trees and they bestowed upon the people of the Middle Ages a most welcome and unexpected inheritance.For without an endless variety of pulleys, the large sailing vessels of the fifteenth century could never have been handled, and without those sailing vessels, the nations of Europe would have been doomed to remain forever marooned on their little continent.

And now we have got to speak of another quality of the human hand which in its multiplied form plays a most important r1e in modern society.

For the hand can do a great many things besides holding and lifting and pulling and striking. It can also serve as a container, as you will know if you have ever drunk water from a brook by means of your hand transformed into a cup.In a pinch, the two hands, with the palms held together, can even be used as a receptach for the purpose of carrying quite a lot of nuts or berries.But of course the hands held together that way can only perform temporary services.After a few minutes they tire and insist upon resuming their normal position by the side of the body.

People knew that 50,000 years ago as well as we do to-day. And they looked for a more permanent form of container in which they could store grain and if possible water.They found this in, the tops of the skulls of their dead enemies.That part of the skull closely resembled two hands being held together and they lay about in enormous profusion, for the idea of burying the dead is of comparatively recent origin.A skull was a grim sort of vegetable dish but people who lived the way cavedwellers lived did not mind such trifles.And the human skull became so popular that it entered into the religion of the people of the North.Their gods invariably used the skulls of their rivals as drinking-mugs and the faithful were promised that they should enjoy the same luxury if they would kindly take the trouble to die in battle.

It would be easy to jump directly from the skull to the grainelevators, for the one as well as the other is merely a substitute for the hollow hand. But ere mall began to build warehouses and water-tanks and storehouses, the hand-as-container had to go through a great many intermediary forms of development, some of which were extraordinarily interesting.

Unless we are entirely mistaken, the first artificial substitute for the skull(or the band, as you will begin to say after reading this book)was the basket. The art of basket-weaving is one of the oldest of the crafts.Willow trees grew in abundance near the shores of those lakes and rivers around which the people of the Stone Age liked to live, and rushes were to be found almost everywhere.The basket gained such great honor in primitive society, that the pattern of nearly entwined twigs and reeds survived far into the Middle Ages and was a favorite model for the stone cutters who carved the pillars of the great cathedrals.

But of course anything made of wood was perishable and we have only circumstantial evidence about the skill of the antediluvian basket-maker, He seems, however, to have been regarded as a very important member of early society, and this respect increased when he learned to cover his wickerwork with an outer coating of leather or clay. For he then gave his people a number of useful inventions.

There was the boat made out of a skeleton of basketry covered with the skins of animals. Next, the light and portable shield, which gained enormous popularity when soldiers began to wander all over the face of the earth.

The clay-covering process was responsible for the house made of a wicker framework covered with wet earth, a method which was revived a few years ago when architects began to build houses made out of steel frames and concrete. But the most interesting development of the basketry craft and the most useful from the point of view of human civilization occurred when a manufacturer of receptacles brought out a new and improved form of nonporous bowl which consisted of an outer shell of basketry covered on the inside with a thick layer of clay.

The new invention was by no means perfect. The clay remained soft and smeary for a long time.All the same, it was much better than anything that had been on the market before and found a ready sale.

The next step, which was to turn the basket into the earthen jar, was probably due to an accident. But accidents have always played a very important rle in the history of invention and deserve a statue of their own in the technological Hall of Fame.Perhaps a basket was dropped into a fire through negligence, or a cave was burned out, or a marauding expedition started a conflagration that destroyed a whole village.Anyway, when the rubbish was cleaned up and the fire was extinguished, it was seen that the protecting cover of twigs and rushes had been consumed by the flames, but that the clay interior not only had remained behind but had been changed into a substance that was as hard as stone.

That was the beginning of pottery.

Gradually the basket was discarded entirely(except for solid substances like olives or melons or potatoes or grain)and pieces of baked day, resembling in their general appearance the hollow of the human band, were substituted for the old-fashioned container that had been woven out of grass or twigs.

In the beginning the day necessary for this purpose was taken from the river bed and rudely fashioned into a hollow shape with the assistance of the fingers. It was a slow and unsatisfactory method but there was no other until an Egyptian invented the potter's wheel.In the beginning, this wheel was set in motion with the left hand while the potter worked his material with the right, but gradually the wheel was brought lower and lower until it reached the floor and became a disc which was set spinning with the help of the feet.At the same time great improvement was made in the art of baking the finished product.

The Chinese apparently were the first to conceive the idea of using a kiln for this purpose. A kiln was a sort of oven which could be tightly closed on all sides, while the contents were exposed to the even temperature of a wood fire;and by way of Babylonia(which forty centuries ago acted as the intermediary between Asia and Europe)the new method soon spread throughout the West.Both the Greeks and the Romans became expert potters and performed new marvels in the field of ceramics through the introduction of a perfected form of glazing which gave their vases and even their common household pots and pans a nice smooth glossy surface and which was first used by the Egyptians, who, in turn, had learned the trick from the Phoenicians.

This is the first time I have had a chance to mention the Phoenicians. They were the middlemen of the ancient world, the common carriers of the Mediterranean.They made nothing but sold everything.Literature and art did not interest them and they contributed very little to the sum total of those technical improvements which the people of the classical world bestowed upon us.Curiously enough, those outspoken materialists, who made enormous fortunes out of the slave trade and who were hated wherever they showed themselves for their merciless harshness in striking a bargain, were responsible for two of the most important inventions of which we have any record.

One of these, glass, had to do with the preservation of liquids;the other, the alphabet, with the preservation of ideas.

There is even to-day a serious difference of opinion as to who made the first glass. According to the Romans and the Greeks, it was a Phoenician merchant who was traveling through the syrian desert and who rested his cooking pots, absolutely through chance, on a few chunks of natron.In the morning be then noticed that the sand of the desert and the natron had melted into small pieces of a transparent substance which seemed to offer great possibilities as substitutes for beads and pearls.

Phoenicia and Egypt were near neighbors. A modern train connects the two countries quite easily within less than ten hours.Soon the jewelers of Memphis and Thebes were selling glass necklaces to their customers.After they had been playing around with this new material for a little while, they found that it could be molded into all sorts of shapes by exposing it to the heat of a medium-sized fire.There are one or two Egyptian pictures of a very old date which seem to prove that the Egyptians had also learned to use the blow-pipe and therefore could make bottles and vases.The pictures, however, are confusing and it is doubtful whether they represent glass-makers or members of another guild.

The Romans, however, were past masters in the art of glassblowing, and during the days of their empire glass became a serious rival of pottery as a substitute for the hand and every form and variety of container which formerly had been made of twigs or clay was now blown out of glass.

The hand had gained in strength, but it wag also becoming brittle.

Accident, as I just said, has played an important rle in the history of inventions. But snobbery also ought to receive honorable mention as an incentive to making ever better and better implements of daily use.

In the beginning ordinary pieces of pottery were good enough for the better-class Roman families. But when the kilns of Britain and the Rhine valley began to flood the Roman market with cheap earthenware, the patricians felt that they could no longer load their tables with mugs and dishes that were to be found in every proletarian home.Hence their willingness to pay generously for rare glass vases and bottles and tankards.Now whenever there is a willingness on the part of certain members of society to expend vast sums upon some particular article of luxury there invariably arises a class of artisans who are not only eager but also capable of fulfilling that want.

The Romans were bad painters and indifferent writers and sculptors, but they were past masters at the business of living. Among other things, they were the first to recognize that meals should be solemn occasions rather than catch-as-catch-can races for the fattest chunks of mutton and the greasiest pieces of marrow-bone.They did not quite succeed in giving us that highly useful substitute for the human fingers known as the fork(which is of very recent date)but they taught the world how to set a table with decency and grace, which is the first step in the right direction of changing the unpleasant process of feeding into the pleasant custom of dining.

Once the artificial container had been invented, a large number of things became possible which had been completely out of the question as long as man had been obliged to do everything with the hollow of his hand.

Among other things, vast tracts of land that lay above the surface of the rivers and the lakes could now be made fertile with the help of a simple form of irrigation machinery, which consisted of levers and pails and ropes. As a result of this, a much larger number of people could be fed than before and the population of several countries doubled and trebled within a few centuries.

But in another way the hand. acting as a conveyor, contributed seriously to the general happiness of the human race.I refer to aqueducts and water-works.The ancients were not very good at medicine.Their physicians knew a few elementary facts about physiology, but were completely ignorant about many things which to-day are taught in grammar-school.They realized, however, that wherever there are a large number of people together, it is absolutely necessary for them to have decent drinking water.

Brooks and rivers are in the habit of purifying themselves of all microbial iniquities whenever left to themselves and given a chance to expose their contents to the rays of the sun. But when towns grew larger and larger and their slums were filled with a larger and larger number of paupers, the near-by rivers were speedily transformed into fertile cesspools, polluted by myriads of busy little microbes.It would of course have been possible to bring water from the near-by mountains in the hollow of one's hand or in a cup or in a pail, but the system would have been rather slow and not very effective.And so the hand(in its rle of container)gradually developed into the aqueduct.

Those who have seen the remnants of the water-works built by the people of the ancient world, who have seen the ruins of their cities full of fountains and well-heads, will realize that the engineers who first thought of this method to provide the millions with fresh mountain water were among the real benefactors of the human race.

Whereupon we bid farewell to the hand as a“container”to speak of it as an instrument that can grip and hold.

In this quality it appears among us mortals first of all as a lock. For no sooner had man built himself a house than he must needs fill his rooms with a large number of worldly goods which were either meant to contribute to his happiness or expected to give him the pleasant feeling that his neighbors envied him for his riches.

To protect such belongings against the attentions of his enemies and friends, he was forced to fasten the door that gave entrance to his domain in such a way that while others could not enter, he himself was not forced to remain outside whenever he wanted to come in. That sounds easy but it was quite difficult.A plain bolt would of course do the trick, but it forced the person who had shot the bolt to stay forever inside the house together with the things he had locked up.Then some one devised a way which made it possible for the person on the outside to unfasten the bolt if he had the right sort of iron pin.

Out of this combination of bolt and pin finally grew the modern lock, which although vastly more reliable has not changed much in its essential qualities from those latches which we see in Egyptian pictures of the thirteenth century before Christ.

All these fasteners, by whatsoever name they were known, were really substitutes for the human hand.

Even those picturesque castles which during the Middle Ages dominated the mountain passes which led from one country to another, and the fortresses which defend our frontiers against foreign aggression, are nothing but bolted doors or, in the terms of this book, are sublimated hands, augmented to the nth power, capable of doing on an enormous scale what the lock on our front door does in a more humble fashion.

Which brings me to still another point which I should discuss with particular attention.

As I have remarked before, the hand has no soul, no conscience, no feeling. It will bestow a benediction at the same time that it draws a stiletto.Since the world bas been created in such a way that every living being must destroy some other living being in order to keep alive(whether the victim be a daisy or a cow)it follows that we can't be angry with man for making use of the greatly multiplied power of his hand to obtain a more regular and abundant supply of food.

He did this first of all by replacing the fist of his bare band by a stone.

Next he sharpened the stone.

Then he turned it into an ax and into a knife and into a harpoon.

With the help of this harpoon, especially during the long periods of cold when he was obliged to struggle morning, noon and night for enough to eat, he accomplished some very remarkable feats. But none of these quite sufficed to satisfy his appetite.Then he figured out that a hand, transformed into a vast ladle, would be able to scoop up infinitely more fish at one and the same moment than the same hand used as a spear.The result was the net which like some sort of vast dredging machine reaches underneath the surface of the water and brings up a thousand fish at a time.

Now that I have mentioned them, fishing boats are perhaps not very pleasent institutions. But what will you?They are necessary.Man must live, and therefore fishes must die.It is regrettable that they must die through slow suffocation, but fortunately they never say much about it, as nature has omitted to provide them with vocal cords.And besides, man from earliest time on had been accustomed to see others perish through strangulation.He had found it one of the easiest ways to dispose of his enemies or to dispose of those captives of war who happened to be a drug on the slave-market.

Who perfected the throttling power of the hand until it became our highly practical modern gallows is not known. The Egyptians(a docile and peace-loving people, too generally poor to be very generally dishonest and too generally well fed to he very generally envious of their neighbors'possessions)did not know this form of punishment.The Greeks were great fighters but seem to have been deficient as executioners.Besides, they were a people with a fine artistic sense and preferred to let their criminals die agreeably and decently in a comfortable room, quaffing a peculiar mixture of wine and poison and holding converse with their friends until the very end.But the Romans, with their respect for“system,”found hanging a very efficient method to rid themselves of the unwanted elements of society, while the Middle Ages, with their vast repertory of torturing implements, retained the noose as a mild form of punishment for those who were considered worthy of special consideration.And since we have once touched the subject of man's inhumanity to man, we may as well finish our little chapter on the hand as an instrument of violenee right here and now, for the sooner we shall be done with it, the better for our self-respect.

By this time it will have become clear to you that a battle-ax was really nothing but a greatly improved fist. When the battle-ax was thrown(a form of fighting highly popular in the early days)it became a fist that was doing its work at a distance.But battle-axes and spears and pieces of stone, when propelled merely by the muscles of the arm, did not carry very far.Something better had to be thought out.And because there was a world-wide demand for a method by which one could propel deadly missiles(in other words, hands provided with sharp points and razorlike blades)across a considerable space of ground(a precaution which allowed the thrower himself to remain well out of reach of his enemy's sword)literally hundreds of thousands of people, during tens of thousands of years, devoted all their waking hours to this one subject and finally it was solved by the invention of the sling-shot and the bow and arrow.

The bow and arrow, being infinitely more accurate, survived, while the sling-shot fell into disuse after a very short time. But the bow and arrow grew and grew, both in shape and size and in deadliness, until near the end of the Middle Ages our old friend, Leonardo, bestowed upon his contemporaries the plans for a stationary how and arrow which was almost as powerful as a small cannon and which would drive a beavy beam through any form of armor that was then on the market.

But in the realm of war, man has shown himself surprisingly cunning. Every new method of attack is invariably answered by a new mode of defense which makes the former a useless waste of time and energy.As soon as the first stone spear had been invented, some one devised a shield.Then the spear-makers got busy and polished their spear-heads until they would slip smoothly through the ordinary wicker shields.Then the shield-makers got busy and covered their shields with cowhide.Then the spear-makers got busy again, and so on and so forth until the present day when we have the big-armament manufacturers, and the big-gun specialists.

During the fourteenth century, however, it seemed for a moment as if the spear-polishers had definitely outwitted the shield-makers, for a chemical compound consisting of saltpeter, sulphur and charcoal, a disastrous trinity of evil forces which until then had only been used for incendiary purposes, was discovered to be possessed of great explosive possibilities and in connection with a hollow brass pipe it was made to heave large stones across several hundred feet of territory.

The new invention came a little too late to be of any use to the Crusaders, who otherwise might have succeeded in gaining Palestine for the good cause. But after the middle of the fourteenth century, the new-fangled“gonne-powder”took part in every battle.

The origin of this strange word is uncertain. It has been suggested that it was the abbreviation of the name Gunnilde, given to one of the hollow brass pipes which were supposed to heave the stone shells at the enemy;and this is quite possible, as those early monsters were all of them called after popular ladies, just as the 42cm.product of Mrs.Krupp's famous factory was affectionately known as a“Dicke Bertha.”

But whatever its name, the noisy blowpipe soon came into its own as the most powerful long-distance fist that had so far been put upon the martial market. It bestowed such enormous advantages upon the quick-moving, fast-shooting infantry, which thus far had been completely at the mercy of the armorclad cavalry, that the noble knights at once passed drastic laws, declaring the innovation to be“contrary to all principles of civilized warfare”and threatening every man caught handling a mangonel or a serpentine with instant death on the gallows as a common pirate and an enemy of mankind.

This did not greatly help their lordships, for the“gonne”proved such a valuable ally to the long-suffering burghers and peasants that the ungainly creature had come to stay, to the great and everlasting detriment of feudal walls and royal fortresses. It was even given a couple of wheels(thereby becoming a sort of portable hand)and it was made the subject of much constant improvement and tender care.

This arrangement might not be ideal from a spiritual point of view, but its value from a practical angle should not be underestimated. For the inhabitants of the rapidly growing cities were usually much better provided with ready cash than their esteemed masters, who dwelled in rustic boredom underneath the leaky roofs of their ancestral castles and therefore the former were able to deprive the latter most efficiently of their leading position in society and hoist themselves into the seats of the mighty.What use thereupon they made of the invention of the legendary Berthold Schwarz(the German monk who appears to have invented the first gun that was of any practical value)is, alas, so well known that I need not repeat it here.

Nor shall I devote much dine to that even more complicated form of the hand-at-its-deadliest, the army. Most of our history books are full of the exploits of the gentlemen who specialized in this sort of“handiwork,”and by some queer trick of the mind those who have“handled”millions of their fellow men with a little more disregard for the sacredness of human life than their opponents are the men who have gained the greatest amount of fame and have acquired the largest number of statues.

I have already described the hand as a crushing instrument. The inventor of the stone hammer undoubtedly was fond of nuts and lobsters and oysters.But gradually, as the human race became a little tamer and a little more domesticated, and commenced to tire of a diet that consisted almost exclusively of dead animals, and added a little grain to its highly irregular meals(prehistoric man either gorged or starved and as a result rarely lived to a ripe old age, as we know from most of the skeletons we have found),and as here and there a few tribes were growing fired of wandering and starving and starving and wandering, and settled down to spend their days in comparative leisure among the pleasant pastures of a hillside;as now and then some more than ordinarily intelligent female among the beasts of burden discovered some new variety of grain that could be raised on little patches of fertile earth, painfully plowed with a sharp stick;as all these many things happened(and they took tens of thousands of years to happen)there arose a demand for a more practical method of crushing certain foodstuffs than that provided either by the hand or by the hammer.

That demand, revaluated into the terms of inventions, meant the gradual change of two human hands into a mortar and a pestle. And when people had grown exasperated with the eternal pounding and hammering and hammering and pounding that were necessary to produce even the smallest amount of meal or olive oil, the mortar grew quite naturally and unavoidably into the mill.

At first the grinding stones of the mill were moved by human labor. Two men or sometimes a horse or a mule, walking ha a circle, pushed the heavy contrivance with slavish regularity and accomplished remarkably little.Until the Romans invented such a method of transmitting power that henceforth an obliging brook or river would do the work of the hand.

That water-wheel was a great success in those parts of the world where there were mountains, but it was of little use in flat countries. Those lands, on the other hand, were abundantly possessed of a sort of motive power which was not quite so common in the countries bordering upon the Mediterranean.That was the wind.And soon all over northern Europe small wooden structures with a couple of grinding-stones safely tucked away in their basement were lifting their four hands to high Heaven, asking that they be allowed to relieve man from his drudgery.

Originally(that is to say as early as the twelfth century, when mills seem to have come into common use in the Low Countries)these artificial hands were placed on rafts, so that the whole machine could be moved around whenever the wind changed. Later on the top of the mill was built in such a way that it could be moved and then the wings began to perform a hundred different tasks formerly entrusted to the human hands, such as sawing wood, making paper, preparing snuff and spices, doing the work of the slow-moving old irrigation engines, getting rice ready for the market and what not.

But all these different industrial processes depended for their success upon a steady supply of wind;and in those countries which were far away from the sea the windmill was not steady enough and if they had no water-power either, they were obliged to work their machinery either with men(a method which was inefficient and slow)or with horses(which meant greater speed but also a much greater overhead, since horses had to be bought for ready cash, whereas women and children could be had for only a couple of pennies a day). It was, therefore, necessary to invent a new form of moving power, one that should be absolutely independent of the elements and that should be reasonable in price.

Now almost since the beginning of history people had known that a certain black substance which was dug out of the soil(it sometimes lay very near the surface)would make excellent burning material, much better than wood or peat or dried seaweed. The Romans had called it“carbo”(see our word“carbon”).The Greeks had called it“anthrax”(see our word“anthracite”).Our own immediate ancestors, when they emerged from the forests of central Europe and learned the first rudiments of civilization, called it“kol.”We call it“coal”and it is nothing but a form of condensed energy which was stored up billions of years ago when the sun was very hot, when the earth was very moist, and when the greater part of the globe was covered with trees which grew to enormous height.

The Romans and Greeks had tried to get at this condensed energy in a wholesale way, but they were bad mining engineers and knew of no better way to gather coal than to let slaves scratch at the brittle substance either with their bare fingers or with stone hammers, methods which on the whole were not very successful.

During the seventeenth century, however, with a return of commerce and international trade, there was an increasing demand for coal and England, which was the leading manufacturing nation of that period, was beginning to work its mines in all seriousness. The mine shafts in those days were mere makeshift affairs.They rarely went very, deep below the surface of the earth, but even so it was found impossible to keep them free from ground water except by a constant use of that substitute for the hand which was known as a“pump.”

Those pumps, however, were very costly. At first they were worked by human hands.Then horses and mules were substituted for men and women.But even so it was difficult to keep the shafts dry and the pumps ate up whatever profits were made from the sale of the coal.All over the world, wherever there were mines, there were owners who were loudly clamoring for a machine that could replace the horses and the human hand and do the work regularly and at small cost.Then it was that a few scientifically minded citizens began to remember something which they had.read in a book about an artifical slave, made of iron and fire, which had been operated in Alexandria, more than fifteen centuries before, and which was said to have been a complete success.

Unfortunately the legendary“fire-engines”of Hero had gone to the scrap-heap together with the Roman Empire and the details about their construction were a bit vague. Nevertheless, a number of courageous Germans and Frenchmen and Englishmen set to work to reconstruct the creatures and within a comparatively short space of time they were able to announce that the trick had been done, that the rejuvenated“fire-machine”stood ready for inspection.

But as has happened so often in the history of human inventions, it was one thing to coax inanimate matter into action, but it was quite a different problem to overcome the inertia of the general public. This need not surprise us.The majority of the people on this planet are no heroes.Like the trees and the little fishes and the beasts of the field, they want to play it safe, and they want to be assured against all sudden changes in their living conditions, which would mean the reshaping of their familiar old habits.The pioneers of this world are those in whom the gambling spirit is greater than the desire for safety.

That is why they are invariably hated by their neighbors and rarely(unless they live to be a hundred)receive any gratitude for their services from the rest of the community.

That is why Denis Papin and Della Porta and Giovanni Branca and the Marquis of Worcester experienced such great difficulties when they tried to make little drops of water do the work of the human hands. That is why Fiske in America was driven to suicide.

Their stamping, snorting, groaning wheels and levers were regarded with deep suspicion by all sound citizens. Those rambling contraptions of stone and steel and iron, belching fire and spewing smoke, were sure to cause the most terrible changes in the living conditions of millions of people.Those millions, since time immemorial, had been accustomed to be abused like veritable beasts of burden.They had long since accepted their fate.They were now merely animated hands, destined to pull and carry and hoist from the cradle(or at least from their fifth or sixth year)to the grave.It was not a very happy fate, but it held no surprises.It was safe.And that was really all that the average man wanted.

When the inventors told these poor slaves of the billions and billions of condensed man-power and horse-power that lay stored up beneath the surface of the earth, that could be set to work to do the tasks now painfully performed by human hands, they asked only one question:“Will it mean that I have to change my own habits, and must I perhaps learn to do something else?”And when they were answered“Yes,”they did not care to listen to any further explanations;how in the end they would gain enormously by being relieved from a hideous job and how it would mean more wealth, less drudgery, fewer broken backs to all mankind. Those particulars did not interest them.They would have to discontinue the habits of a lifetime, they would be obliged to live differently from their grandfathers and greatgrandfathers.That was enough to make them condemn the new artificial hand as a blasphemous and arrogant effort to rival the powers of God.That was enough to make every minister in the land decry the brazen sinfulness of those who in their pride endeavored to improve upon the handiwork of the Almighty.

James Watt was successful not only because he improved the fire engine in such a way that it could be worked without the constant assistance of the human hand, but primarily because he was one of the latest of the fire-engine enthusiasts to appear upon the scene. When he took out his patent, the world had already listened to a hundred and fifty years of propaganda in favor of steam as a substitute for muscle and the strength of the opposition had considerably weakened.

That was the beginning of a new and curious chapter in the history, of the human race.

The steam engine had been invented to replace the horses which had been set to work to replace the human hand in working the pumps of a mine. Gradually it was discovered that the same engine could be used for a multitude of purposes.Then all the world began to use fire machines.Then it became necessary to develop more and more coal mines, because the hungry maw of the fiery monster devoured millions of tons of coal a day.Then more and more mines had to be dug and larger and larger quantities of prehistoric energy had to be brought to the surface of the earth to keep the engines going.Then it was necessary to build still more engines to work the mines.Until coal had become the recognized ruler of the world and the nation that was possessed of the largest number of coal mines could dictate its will to all its rivals.

It was not exactly a happy development and not at all what the inventors of this mundane substitute for the hand had foreseen. Contrary to all noble expectations, the same people who only a few years before had been relieved from a most degrading form of manual labor were now being enslaved by an inanimate creature which was even less merciful than the human taskmasters of twenty years before.

There is only one consolation. The era of the coal-fed engines seems destined to be only an intermediary period of development.Even to-day it is showing signs of coming to an end.Not because the subterranean storehouses of condensed prehistoric energy are in any danger of becoming exhausted(we arc still far from that point)but because there arc too many disadvantages connected with the use of coal.It is hard to get at.It is messy.Coal mining, ever since the beginning of the industry, has been the sort of labor that is left to the most abused classes of society.It is a dangerous trade.People hate to work several thousand feet underneath the surface of the soil when the sun shines pleasantly upon the rest of the world.Both the mines and the storage places for coal will disfigure any landscape for miles around.And then there is the cost of transporting the coal from the mine-pit to its final place of employment.

As long as the steam engine was the only substitute for the hand that could develop the power necessary to make the million and one wheels of our modern engines go round, we had no choice in the matter, as those of us who remember the coal strikes of a generation or so ago well know.

To-day in many lands, whenever the miners take a vacation, the hand of the community becomes paralyzed and every one feels the results either in the form of hunger or cold. But our dependence upon coal is no longer as absolute as before.For one thing, the steam engine is no longer the main source of power.When it was about sixty years old, it got a little brother which was baptized, Dynamo after a long-forgotten Greek grandpapa who had belonged to the Power family.During the first few years of its existence, the child was very feeble.For a time it even looked as if it would not survive and as if the great fortune which its godfather, Michael Faraday, had predicted for it, would come to nothing.

But with the increasing demand for power and power and ever more power, this method of converting mechanical energy into electric energy proved too valuable to be relegated to the museum of mechanical curiosities. To-day the dynamo is quite as valuable to society as the steam engine, in replacing the labor of the human hand, and with its softly purring ways it has become a great deal more popular than its puffing and wheezing older cousin.

But about half a century ago, when it seemed that henceforth the steam hand and the electric hand would divide all the work in the world between them, the old cronies were pleasantly surprised by the arrival of still another little brother which grew so fast and so furiously that for a short time it looked as if it would drive both its older and more respectable relatives out of existence. The name of the upstart was Motor and it lived on decayed animal matter, just as Steam Engine subsisted on old vegetable mold.

It derived its daily pabulum from vast reservoirs of an oily substance which lay hidden deep below the surface of the earth, and the existence of which had been suspected as long as forty centuries ago. In those days the oil that occasionally oozed forth from the pores of a rocky soil had been used only for purposes of illumination.What this earth oil was, that nobody had been able to tell, and even to-day with all our knowledge of chemistry we can only guess at the origin of that indispensable form of fuel.For although we seem to have reason to suppose that petroleum is an animal rather than a vegetable product and consists of the liquefied remains of billions and quadrillions of microscopically small creatures who lived in the seas of this earth millions of years before our planet assumed its present shape, we do not know for sure and although little drops of gas oil(a substance distilled out of crude earth oil)have become so important that the fate of empires has come to depend upon them, they continue to be as much of a mystery as they were in the days when the people of Ecbatana and Babylon burned each other's cities with the help of a couple of barrels of rock oil.

The motor, however, has never shown the slightest interest in the scientific composition of its food. It has kept on developing at a furious rate of speed and as a substitute for the hand has rapidly gained a most tremendous popularity.It is a voracious creature and in order to keep it satisfied, we have been obliged to tap the prehistoric containers of liquefied animal matter with more haste than is quite desirable.Indeed, many serious scientists have taken alarm and are predicting the ultimate extinction of the internal combustion engine through the lack of proper nourishment.

This, is seems to me, need not worry us very much. Man, having at last tasted the joys of comparative freedom from drudgery, will never again submit to the slavery of his grandfather's day without putting up a terrific fight, Everywhere he is experimenting with new substitutes for the human hand.He is building new sorts of mills that shall utilize the air-currents.He is forcing waterfalls and mountain streams and the tides of the ocean to work his dynamos for him.He has east a reflective eye upon the rays of the sun which thus far have gone completely to waste.And he is trying(not very successfully so far)to liquefy coal or to devise a new sort of alcohol that he may use them as substitutes for the oily food upon which his rapacious but delicately constructed slaves of the great Motor family depend for their happiness, and without which they positively refuse to turn a wheel or do a stroke of work.

Predictions about the immediate future of technical developments have greatly contributed to the sum total of this world's literary nonsense. For all I know some inventive genius may devise a method by which the diminutive cyclones created by the wings of wasps and humming-birds may be converted into the energy necessary to run all our engines.And I am quite certain that long before the last oil field shall have been tapped of its last drop of oil, the combined intelligence of the human race will have discovered a new way in which to keep these engines running.

For nothing is quite as contagious as a love for comfort and people who have been accustomed all their lives to drive in motor cars are not going back to the stagecoach if it costs them their last penny to find a suitable substitute for the smelly stuff that pours forth from the howels of the earth.

I am not exactly a wild enthusiast about all the achievements of the species of mammal to which I happen to belong. It often seems to me that our dog Noodle derives a great deal more happiness out of his canine existence than most of my friends.But that after all is a mood, and a passing mood.For the amiable dachshund lives in a world“all found.”In exchange for nothing more substantial than that loyal devotion of which he seems to possess an unlimited supply, he is provided with a decent bed, plentiful food and an occasional bath.

Perhaps if all cares and worries were removed from me, provided I were fairly obedient, desisted from chasing the neighbors'eats and sometimes were willing to come when I was called, I also might look upon life with serene contentment. But I should miss the main satisfaction which gives us an advantage over the rest of the animal kingdom—I should never be able to realize that this world, as the late Galileo Galilei is said to have observed, that this world does move.I do not mean in the sense of spinning around the sun.I mean in the sense of growing to be just a little more intelligent, a little less cruel and a little more bearable for the majority of my neighbors than it has ever been before.

The unfortunate fact that the hand is forging ahead by leaps and bounds while the brain is developing its faculties with exasperating slowness—that mechanically we live in the year of grace 1928 while spiritually we are but little removed from our earliest ancestors—that in short we are naught but cave-dwellers going on a joy-ride in a Chevrolet—all this I realize full well but I refuse to listen to the defeatists who urge me not to inquire any further into the secrets of the unsolvable because the thing is hopeless;because we are foredoomed to failure;because all our much vaunted knowledge only seems to lead to ruin and unhappiness.

The Great War was not caused by the fact that we knew too much.

It merely proved in a most disastrous fashion that we did not yet know enough.

And the same holds true of that social unrest which grins at us from all sides. It is foolish to say that this widespread discontent is the result of the mechanical and industrial revolution which followed in the wake of the substitute hands respectively called the steam engine, the dynamo and the motor.I do not mean to deny the existence of a great deal of misery or to overlook the fact that many of the people whose business it is to keep these inanimate monsters alive hate their charges with a deep and all-consuming hatred and have a good reason to do so, But these conditions are beside the point.They are details.They have nothing to do with the case.One might as well argue against the widespread use of opiates in the field of medicine and insist that the sufferers in our hospitals be left without the relief afforded by cocaine and morphine because a few weak brethren sniff the stuff for the fun of it and have to be suppressed by the police when they begin to make a nuisance of themselves, and one might just as soon denounce automobiles because occasionally a silly child of twelve runs away with his papa's car and comes to grief in the village pond.

No, the Iron Man has come to stay and all the fair words in the world will not deprive him of one iota of his power.

The day when the workman did everything with his own hands is gone for good and all. The day when the workman carried his modest bag of tools(his renforced hands)on his own back is gone, except in a few of the highly skilled trades, The day when the workman sat at home and sweated over some miserable mechanical contrivance which had been loaned to him by some one rich enough to buy the costly tools which were out of reach of the average artisan—that day, too, is fast approaching its end.The day of the sublimated and centralized communal hand known as the factory has arrived and it would be as foolish to fight this useful institution as it would be criminal to close our eyes to the tremendous difficulties which arise whenever entire nations are suddenly forced to adopt radically new methods of thinking and living, long before their minds have been prepared for the change.

The machine-age has descended upon us almost as unexpectedly as the ice-age, ha the panic that followed a great many things happened that invariably happen during panics and which are seldom pleasant to contemplate. But the human race which was able to survive the infinitely greater economic mad social revolution caused by the appearance of the glaciers will surely find a way out of the present difficulties.

To-day in America even the poorest of the poor have eleven silent slaves who work for them while they are devoting their attention to something else—dumb but willing creatures who carry and fetch and lift and do a multitude of things which only a century ago had to be lifted and carried by human hands and human backs.

To-day even the slummiest of slum-dwellers is able to enjoy certain luxuries of which Charlemagne, in all his glory(and he was a most powerful sovereign),had not dared to dream from fear of being dragged before a commission in lunacy.

This sounds like the after-luncheon speech of a professional booster employed by some publicutilities corporation to convince the Chamber of Commerce of a seventh-rate town of the necessity for building a supplementary electric plant.

Heaven forbid!

The gigantic substitute hand of our modern age, badly guided and totally uninspired, left to the mercy of greedy masters, is still capable of an infinite amount of harm.

But by the same token it is capable of an infinite amount of good.

The choice, my friends, is with ourselves.