Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/540

522 began to fail they could employ others. Finally they fell back on shells, and it is impossible not to admire some of their works executed with such imperfect instruments, with fragments of stone less hard than our silex, and the débris of marine shells. After stone, appeared the metals; but not iron, of which we know so well the uses and which alone has made possible the miracles of our modern industry. Copper and bronze preceded iron; in America copper, in our Europe bronze, came after stone. Finally, iron made its appearance, and many evidences prove that from its first discovery its value was understood. In the gymnastic plays celebrated by Achilles on the tomb of his friend Patroclus, at the epoch of the Trojan War, twelve centuries before our era, a mass of iron is proposed as a prize, and Achilles himself speaks of its importance.

The diversity of material employed in utensils marks the true stages in the history of ancient peoples. At this time we generally admit as distinct periods the age of stone, the age of bronze, the age of iron. The age of stone is divided into two periods, according as the utensils and weapons were polished or only shaped. It is to this most ancient period that the population belonged which lived in Europe with the elephant and rhinoceros.

I must refer you to the special history of the several races for further details of their industries. But I will add a few facts to the preceding. Let us speak a word about the warlike industries.

Wherever human society exists, we find instruments of war. After the need of food, it seems the most pressing want of man is to kill or enslave his kind. We may say that man is warlike being.

Among the lowest people of the globe we find offensive and defensive arms; and everywhere those at the bottom of the scale astonish us by the ingenuity of these arms. The Australians, certainly a most inferior people, use a not very large but very thick shield. Their skill in parrying strokes is most remarkable, as all travelers admit. The same people use curious weapons; one, called the boomerang (Fig. 5), is a bit of hard wood, very flat, sharp, and more or less curved. The inhabitants know how to throw this little piece of wood so that, after it has struck the enemy or the game, it rises in the air, turns, and falls into the hand of the thrower. The boomerang realizes, then, the