22 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



and, in desperation, threw the fire toward the river, there to quench 

 it forever. But, fortunately for the black man, the sharp-eyed hawk 

 was hovering near, and, seeing the fire fall into the water, with a 

 stroke of his wine: he knocked the brand far over the stream into the 

 long, dry grass of the opposite bank, and the flames spread over the 

 face of the country. The black man then felt the fire, and said it 

 was good." ' 



Did prehistoric man possess fire ? If we are to believe the Abbe 

 Bourgeois, man was in possession of fire since Miocene times. This 

 assertion rests upon the discovery in the sands of the Orleanais of a 

 fragment of artificial paste 2 mixed with charcoal, and lying in the 

 midst of mastodon and dinotherium bones. It also rests, but not so 

 firmly, upon the discovery by the same savant of cracked flints in the 

 neighborhood of Thenay, not far from the banks of the lake of Beauce. 

 These flints appear to bear plain traces of the action of fire ; but may 

 not these be due to lightning ? If not, where are the ashes, where 

 the charcoal which naturally would accompany the flints if they had 

 been really brought under the action of fire ? Then, where is the fire- 

 place ? Hence, the Abbe Bourgeois's deduction is not an impossible 

 one, though in my opinion it is by no means demonstrated. 



But, though the discovery of fire in Miocene times may be ques- 

 tioned, it cannot be denied that in the earliest Quaternary times this 

 element was known to man. Several fireplaces, ashes, charcoal, bones, 

 either entire or partly calcined, fragments of coarse pottery black- 

 ened by smoke, and similar objects, have been found in caverns be- 

 longing to the epoch of the Cave Bear, and of the Reindeer and the 

 Polished Stone age. These things prove that the men who inhabited 

 the caves commonly enough cooked their food, thus making it more 

 readily digestible. 



With the aid of fire, prehistoric man cremated his dead, hollowed 

 out his pirogue, and saved from too rapid destruction the lower extrem- 

 ity of the piles on which he built his lake-dwellings. And not only 

 did the troglodyte and the lacustrian know how to cook their food 

 and warm their habitations, but they also were acquainted with vari- 

 ous methods of lighting them during the darkness of night. There 

 have been found in the Lake of Geneva carbonized sticks of resinous 

 wood, which, in all probability, once were employed for this latter 

 purpose. Just as the Esquimaux now light their snow huts by means 

 of lamps fed with the oil of the porpoise or the whale, so did the 

 Danes of the kitchen-middens use, for illuminating purposes, a wick 

 made of moss, one end of which was introduced into the stomach of a 

 great penguin (Alca impennis) filled with fat. 



The use of flint, quartz, and iron pyrites, in the Lacustrian period, 

 for procuring fire by striking these substances against one another, is 



1 Vol. i., p. 139. 



2 Paste, the mineral substance in which other minerals are imbedded. Webster. 



