Page:The Kinematics of Machinery.djvu/227

 THE FIRST MACHINE. 205

the hands, until the shreds rubbed off the wood, or some fibres of cotton or fragments of pith placed upon it, catch fire (Fig. 160).* The hands have not merely to twirl the wood (made somewhat too European-looking in our illustration), but also to press it con- tinually downwards upon the other piece held fast horizontally with the toes or knees so that they gradually move downwards upon it. For woods which are comparatively uninflammable two men therefore must work together, the one beginning to twirl the upper end of the stick when the hands of the other have reached its lower end. 24 From the descriptions which we have the apparatus appears to have been, very similar to the " fire-drill " even now used by the Brahmins, although distinct and not altogether unimportant differences may really exist.

In later times, long after the first use of the " double- wood," a cord was wound once or twice round the twirling-stick, its ends held in the hands and pulled back- wards and forwards, and by this means the stick received its motion (Fig. 161).

The upper end of the twirling- stick was now also sharpened, and the required downward pressure was given to it through a third piece of wood similar to the under piece, held and pressed down by a second worker.-f- It will be quite evident to all who have studied primitive his- tory with any degree of thoroughness FlG 160 that any such improved application

of such an important apparatus as this presupposes for it the most widely-extended use. Some notion of this may be obtained from the fact that at the great sacrificial feast of the Hindoos, the people from whom the Europeans have sprung, it was prescribed in the

See Tylor, Early History of Mankind. London, 1870, § 241; and Klemm, vol. II. § 66.

t I take figures 160 and 161 from the work of Tylor's quoted above. The latter represents two Esquimaux making fire, and is copied from a drawing of the last century. Tylor describes also another series of these "fire-drills" belonging to a later period. /^ k