Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/602

584 was there before the Mound-builder? I would speak to-night of what must have been long before his time—of early, though perhaps not earliest, man in North America. We must know this early man by our experience of his traces. New observations of fact and the ideas they have awakened in myself are put forward, so that you may judge of the reasonableness of the conclusions. And here any boy will afford a competent illustration of the evidence. Almost the first thing that our boys do is to throw stones. It is one of their ways of saying No. There is more than one parallel between savages and our boys to be maintained. Just as the state of mind of the adult savage is paralleled by that of our children, so we must expect that so common a weapon as a stone is to our boys must be extensively used by savages. And this, in fact, is what we do find. There was also a time when this stone-throwing was the occupation of grown men of our own race. Stones were used in the warfare of the Celt and the Roman. We remember that David, a Semite, used a pebble from the brook. And we shall find that men of other races, and before David, resorted to the same weapon for all the purposes which in David's time, and with his race, were partly served by metals. There is, then, not only a parallel to be drawn between our boys and savages in certain ways, but there exists one between these boys of the present and our own men of the past. Just as, when cutting into the crust of the earth, we find the remains of animals and plants which once inhabited its former surfaces, the simpler forms below, the more complex above, so we find the remains of man's tools and implements in the clays and gravels of the last geological period of the globe, and with a like sequence in their character. The oldest and lowest forms of tools are simplest; the newer and nearer to the present surface, the more varied and complex. We have seen that the simplest weapon man could use would be a stone. Even now a wagoner with broken cart looks around naturally for a stone to pound with, and so mend his ways. He picks up a stone on occasion as his ancestors did on most occasions. For the moment he is in the Stone age. And he uses what the earliest man must have undoubtedly used, a stone just as it is. There must have been a time when men picked up such stones as came in their way at the moment with which to throw at animals, to break their food, to injure their fellow-men. Such stones, unaltered by use, can no longer be identified.

It is easy to see how, through long lapses of time, men continued to select stones, with an ever-increasing care as to their shape and size. The best to fling, the surest to hit, the sharpest to cut, were picked out, assorted in leisure moments, stored for future use. The hunter, meeting with game, could find no stone suited to bring it down at the moment, and so came at last to carry this primitive shot about with him in his hunting. The way from such a process, and a mode of improving the best of these stones by an artificial changing