158 Til A NS ACTIONS OF THE 



of the rock with blows. He is not long in learning that the part 

 broken off has similar edges. If it be large enough to lie firmly he 

 can employ it as he does the parent rock. If smaller, he may hold 

 it firmly with his feet while he manipulates the wood upon it with his 

 hands. Perhaps he can carry it away and use it at the place most 

 convenient to him; when dulled he can shiver it by a blow or two 

 and it is sharp again. And then at last by slow degrees, requiring 

 ages perhaps, one can hardly tell how, but by the continuance of this 

 process, he observes that these splinters struck from the fragment, 

 these fragments of fragments, possess the same cutting edges as the 

 original rock, and in a bit of stone not larger than his hand or his 

 finger he possesses an instrumentality capable of doing all that he 

 and his ancestors have been laboriously doing on the parent rock 

 or clumsy fragment. He learns also that instead of dragging the 

 wood over the edge, he can, with a totally different manipulation, . 

 hold the wood firmly and operate on it with the stone splinter, and 

 the tool is invented.* 



When I tlxink of man in his primitive condition, as the logical 

 necessities of this subject have compelled me to think of him, help- 

 less, miserable, the prey of beasts,. without tools, withouc means of 

 defense except such as he shared with the beasts, and then think of 

 him in the condition to which he is brought in this outline of his 

 inventions, I find it impossible to adequately express my sense of 

 the progress he has made. One effective weapon, its structure im- 

 proved, and skill in its use acquired by generations of experience, 

 and one cutting tool, even in the rudimentary form of an unfash- 

 ioned flake, have separated him incalculably from the condition of 

 his ancestors. His knife or hatchet, as we may henceforth call it, 

 contained within it all the possibilities of the future, but for the 

 present — his present — its capabilities were learned by constant les- 

 sons and with every new occasion. He had no want to which it 

 did not minister. It not only served its first purpose to prepare his 

 weapon, but it became itself a weapon. It served him to procure 

 and prepare his food, both animal and vegetable, his shelter, his 

 raiment, if he had reached the stage of wanting raiment. Its 



* It is only by a loose construction of language that this can be called the inven- 

 tion of a tool. The tool, a mere flake of stone, had already long existed. The 

 actual invention was an art or process quite distinct from any heretofore employed. 

 The brief and more popular form of expression may be employed with this 

 explanation. 



