5 8 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was there before the Mound-builder ? I would speak to-night of 

 what must have been long before his time of early, though perhaps 

 not earliest, man in North America. We must know this early man 

 by our experience of his traces. New observations of fact and the 

 ideas they have awakened in myself are put forward, so that you may 

 judge of the reasonableness of the conclusions. And here any boy 

 -will afford a competent illustration of the evidence. Almost the first 

 thing that our boys do is to throw stones. It is one of their ways 

 of saying No. There is more than one parallel between savages and 

 our boys to be maintained. Just as the state of mind of the adult 

 savage is paralleled by that of our children, so we must expect that 

 so common a weapon as a stone is to our boys must be extensively 

 used by savages. And this, in fact, is what we do find. There was 

 also a time when this stone-throwing was the occupation of grown 

 men of our own race. Stones were used in the warfare of the Celt 

 and the Roman. We remember that David, a Semite, used a pebble 

 from the brook. And we shall find that men of other races, and 

 before David, resorted to the same weapon for all the purposes which 

 in David's time, and with his race, were partly served by metals. 

 There is, then, not only a parallel to be drawn between our boys and 

 savages in certain ways, but there exists one between these boys of 

 the present and our own men of the past. Just as, when cutting into 

 the crust of the earth, we find the remains of animals and plants which 

 once inhabited its former surfaces, the simpler forms below, the more 

 complex above, so we find the remains of man's tools and implements 

 in the clays and gravels of the last geological period of the globe, 

 and with a like sequence in their character. The oldest and lowest 

 forms of tools are simplest ; the newer and nearer to the present sur- 

 face, the more varied and complex. We have seen that the simplest 

 weapon man could use would be a stone. Even now a wagoner with 

 broken cart looks around naturally for a stone to pound with, and so 

 mend his ways. He picks up a stone on occasion as his ancestors did 

 on most occasions. For the moment he is in the Stone age. And he 

 uses what the earliest man must have undoubtedly used, a stone just 

 as it is. There must have been a time when men picked up such 

 stones as came in their way at the moment with which to throw at 

 animals, to break their food, to injure their fellow-men. Such stones, 

 unaltered by use, can no longer be identified. 



It is easy to see how, through long lapses of time, men continued 

 to select stones, with an ever-increasing care as to their shape and 

 size. The best to fling, the surest to hit, the sharpest to cut, were 

 picked out, assorted in leisure moments, stored for future use. The 

 hunter, meeting with game, could find no stone suited to bring it 

 down at the moment, and so came at last to carry this primitive shot 

 about with him in his hunting. The way from such a process, and 

 a mode of improving the best of these stones by an artificial changing 



