Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/246

234 We can imagine man in a savage state. "The penalty of Adam's—the seasons' difference"—was full upon him; at first he crept, like the beasts, within groves and hollow trees, or into dark caves and holes dug in the earth; or else he perched himself, like the birds, in nests built with less skill than those of the swallow or the stork. But necessity is the mother of invention; and the gradual sharpening of his obtuse faculties soon taught man how to procure a better shelter. In the dawn of social impulses, noting the fall of the rain and the sweep of the wind, and feeling the necessity of providing for his own security against the wild beasts; next, deriving some rude ideas of stability from the contemplation of the material world and of the structures instinctively erected by animals, he turned his mind to the construction of dwellings which might afford him real protection, and he availed himself of the materials at hand—the trees by which he was surrounded. The art of building, which has invariably been the starting-point of civilization and the precursor of every species of knowledge, was thus originated. The art of the carpenter is thus the earliest of arts; and the glorious monuments of later ages may, in their main outlines, and even in many of their smaller parts, be traced to the rough wood huts which arose in the wild forests and in the midst of lakes during the prehistorical times.

Like Cuvier, who, out of an age-eaten bone, was able to rebuild the skeleton of a whole fish, paleontologists of our day have, from the scanty remains found in the lakes of Europe, deduced almost to a certainty the characteristics of the lacustrine dwellings which formed the abode of man during the neolithic period of the Stone age. The interest awakened by such discoveries has been so great as to render it wholly needless for us to give a description of the house, bridge, and boat building of prehistoric man. The savages of the present age seem to have been providentially left to confirm the truths which paleontology has endeavored to wrench from the bowels of the earth and the depths of the water; they seem to be left as milestones to indicate the road that mankind has passed over, or rather, as Edmond About says, "They are the stragglers in the army of civilization, by the presence of whom we are informed whence the great body started and whither it went." Reliable accounts of travelers bear witness, in fact, to the existence, even at the present day, of certain Asiatic and Polynesian islanders, who still inhabit wood dwellings erected on piles driven into the water, thus perpetuating a custom prevailing in times beyond record. Herodotus has a passage relating to a tribe that dwelt five hundred and twenty years before the Christian era on Lake Prasias, in Thrace, the modern Roumelia, whose modes of life illustrate those of the lake-dwellers. According to this historian, the Pæonians lived upon the lake in dwellings erected on platforms, which were supported by piles and connected with the land by narrow bridges. They were polygamists, and a law directed that, for each wife, three piles