21 8 POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY. 



soon learned that clay by itself was a capital material for oven, 

 pot, or kettle, and Sevres and Worcester, with all their varied art, 

 here took their rise. As primitive fisherman and hunter, man 

 employed fire to lure his prey, to affright the beasts to which he 

 himself was prey, or to yield protecting smoke against insect pests 

 scarcely less to be dreaded. In later ages as mariner he erected 

 on storm-beaten coasts beacons whose carefully tended blaze gave 

 warning or comfort to drifting voyagers, the flickering ray fore- 

 telling the sunlike beam of Sandy Hook or Skerry vore. As war- 

 rior he crowned the hills with similar flares to voice alarm to 

 scattered allies, prefiguring every modern telegraph. Again, as 

 warrior, having profited by the hardness fire conferred upon his 

 wooden spear, he was to receive gifts yet greater. Where, as on 

 the shores of Lake Superior, native copper almost pure lay upon 

 the ground, it was laboriously pounded into the primitive knife 

 or hammer. With fire his servant, the savage was independent 

 of such rare finds. Wherever he came upon an earthy mass, glit- 

 tering with however small a fraction of metal, he had but to 

 bring the ore to his hearth to free cop'per or iron from its bond- 

 age. There and then the art of the founder began to take the 

 place of the drudgery of the smith — a supersedure characteristic 

 enough and one of an uncounted series where good has had to 

 make way for better, where the worker and the fighter himself 

 has been overcome by stronger thews and keener wits. No tri- 

 umph of miner or chemist, of engineer on land or sea, that does 

 not date from the memorable hour when a savage just a little 

 cleverer than his fellows kindled for himself a blaze. Plainly, 

 then, fire came among the resources of man as a permutator of 

 exalted power. It gave an impulse to food-getting, to tool and 

 weapon making, to building, to migration, to every art that 

 cheered and adorned the home. It was an influence as pregnant 

 as any that has made man human and brought the empire of 

 Nature to his feet. 



Through the course of all the ages since, almost down to our 

 own day, flame had beside her a twin force all unrecognized. 

 Elusive as a wood nymph she glinted as lightning, or as the 

 aurora streamed fitfully across the sky. Anon she condescended 

 to the amber of the sea beach, which under gentle friction drew 

 to itself fragments of fallen leaves, of withered straw. In yet 

 other guise she defied the downward tendency of unsupported 

 masses, and, as the legend tells us, sorely puzzled a shepherd in 

 bidding his crook cling fast to the ceiling of a cave roofed, as we 

 would say now, with magnetic ore. At a later day the magnet 

 became something more than an empty marvel, and as the com- 

 pass assumed the office of guiding sun and star when these wei e 

 hidden. Little wonder that so various a masquerade was long 



