Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/557

Rh people at a given moment, but of the accumulation of many small inventions and ideas which each generation has brought as its contribution to the entire work. This may be clearly seen by the study of the genesis of social institutions. Ministries are at this day a very complex institution, and therefore were not created at one cast. What was their origin? In Egypt, the king's fan-bearer belonged to the military staff, and in time of war commanded a division of the army. In Assyria, the king's eunuchs acquired great political importance. They became the monarch's counselors in peace and his generals in war. In France, in the Merovingian period, the blacksmith and the chamberlain, who were personal servants of the king, became public functionaries. In England, in the most ancient times, the four great functionaries of state were the master of the robes, the superintendent of horses, the blacksmith, and the house steward. This shows that the position of minister was not deliberately created, but that when the king found, especially in military affairs, that his functions were too numerous, he delegated one to a servant. At first this could certainly have been merely a temporary expedient, which through the continuance of the conditions which led to it became definitive. From this first sketch arose, by successive small modifications, the whole political structure."

With other examples, and by close reasoning, the author closes his introduction by saying that "symbols also must be regarded as the unpremeditated result of a series of small inventions, each intended to satisfy some elementary need."

Ferrero then passes on to the main divisions of his essay. He treats first of symbols of proof, as he names them, dealing at length with the written document, so important to the transactions of modern civilization and yet so tardily produced, and for a long time so incomprehensible to the multitude. Ferrero describes the primitive symbols that existed to guarantee property, or to mark the right of conquest, and of contracts in general, particularly of matrimony, of parental authority, and of adoption. After a minute examination of their origin, he writes: "We see thus from these examples how symbols of this class have nothing mysterious about them. They are only our written documents, our citations, etc., in a less abstract and more simple and primitive form. To us, accustomed to the dry and bare juridical forms of our own time, these symbols make a singular impression, almost as of simple and ingenuous poetry; but we may be assured that those who practiced those acts found no more poetry in them than we find in our formalities. These symbols are characterized by the greater simplicity of the mental effort necessary to understand them, as compared with our own