Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/399

 HISTORICAL CONTINUITY OF SCIENCE 393

it is complete. The spear or arrow may be imperfect and yet admit of being impelled towards its object, but the means of impulsion em- bodied in the bow must have been completely developed and its purpose foreseen before its enormous utility could by any possibility be demon- strated. When we reflect upon the limited facilities and pitifully im- perfect instruments of primitive man, upon his almost utter lack of experience of propelling instruments or indeed of any other kind of instruments, and of the conservatism imposed upon him by tribal ritual, we must I think admit that the discovery (or perhaps repeated re- discovery) of the bow is an unassailable proof of the existence among our primitive ancestors of men the creative vigor of whose intellect and capacity for taking infinite pains could not be surpassed by any of the investigators and inventors of our own epoch.

The power of man as a destructive agent was enormously enhanced by the discovery of the bow; no proportionate increase in destructive power was ever to occur again in his history until the day of the dis- covery of gunpowder. But power to destroy was not enough, the power to create was needed to supply its complement. Unchecked destruc- tion implied ever increasing labors of the chase and automatically enforced a limitation to the human population of any given area, as happened, for example, in the areas inhabited by the North American Indian. But side by side with the rise of man's destructive power arose his constructive abilities, and it is in the means he chose and the success he achieved in his endeavor to provide a certain and predictable supply of animal food that we recognize some of the most striking evi- dence of the flexibility and adaptability of the intellectual weapon which' he had begun to fashion for the conquest of nature.

The domestication of animals demanded minute observation of their habits in order to acquire that sympathy with their requirements which was an indispensable factor of success, and this knowledge acquired, the patience which was exerted in applying it must have been of an order which in our age of facile mediocre accomplishment is seldom displayed elsewhere than within the laboratory of the scientific in- vestigator.

Eeturning again to a considerably earlier period in the history of primitive man, the discovery of the means of producing and the art of utilizing fire must have demanded abundant employment of observa- tion, comparison, deduction and trial. I have elsewhere endeavored* to reconstruct in imagination the train of events which culminated in these discoveries. In the first instance the discovery of fire was prob- ably fortuitous, but the number of factors, friction between the right types of surfaces, the presence of tinder of the requisite inflammability, the assistance of combustion by a current of air, while insuflBcienfly

s"The TJmverse and the Mayonnaise and other Stories for Children.'^ London and New Tork, John Lane, 1913.

VOL. in. — ^27.

�� �