Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/232

218 soon learned that clay by itself was a capital material for oven, pot, or kettle, and Sèvres and Worcester, with all their varied art, here took their rise. As primitive fisherman and hunter, man employed fire to lure his prey, to affright the beasts to which he himself was prey, or to yield protecting smoke against insect pests scarcely less to be dreaded. In later ages as mariner he erected on storm-beaten coasts beacons whose carefully tended blaze gave warning or comfort to drifting voyagers, the flickering ray foretelling the sunlike beam of Sandy Hook or Skerryvore. As warrior he crowned the hills with similar flares to voice alarm to scattered allies, prefiguring every modern telegraph. Again, as warrior, having profited by the hardness fire conferred upon his wooden spear, he was to receive gifts yet greater. Where, as on the shores of Lake Superior, native copper almost pure lay upon the ground, it was laboriously pounded into the primitive knife or hammer. With fire his servant, the savage was independent of such rare finds. Wherever he came upon an earthy mass, glittering with however small a fraction of metal, he had but to bring the ore to his hearth to free copper or iron from its bondage. There and then the art of the founder began to take the place of the drudgery of the smith—a supersedure characteristic enough and one of an uncounted series where good has had to make way for better, where the worker and the fighter himself has been overcome by stronger thews and keener wits. No triumph of miner or chemist, of engineer on land or sea, that does not date from the memorable hour when a savage just a little cleverer than his fellows kindled for himself a blaze. Plainly, then, fire came among the resources of man as a permutator of exalted power. It gave an impulse to food-getting, to tool and weapon making, to building, to migration, to every art that cheered and adorned the home. It was an influence as pregnant as any that has made man human and brought the empire of Nature to his feet.

Through the course of all the ages since, almost down to our own day, flame had beside her a twin force all unrecognized. Elusive as a wood nymph she glinted as lightning, or as the aurora streamed fitfully across the sky. Anon she condescended to the amber of the sea beach, which under gentle friction drew to itself fragments of fallen leaves, of withered straw. In yet other guise she defied the downward tendency of unsupported masses, and, as the legend tells us, sorely puzzled a shepherd in bidding his crook cling fast to the ceiling of a cave roofed, as we would say now, with magnetic ore. At a later day the magnet became something more than an empty marvel, and as the compass assumed the office of guiding sun and star when these were hidden. Little wonder that so various a masquerade was long