6 



gold from brass. The use of flint and steel they learnt from the 

 Japanese. 



But, perhaps, it is unnecessary to assume such a wooden 

 stage, since we are assured that even the apes use stones 

 as well as sticks, throwing them at intruders, — the most 

 primitive welcome to strangers, — and also employing them to 

 break cocoanuts. It is, however, interesting to remember in 

 this connection that, apart altogether from the employment for 

 that purpose of flints and pyrites, there is a primitive method of 

 obtaining fire from sticks alone, a plan still in use among the 

 Australian blacks ; that throwing stick or boomerang seem more 

 primitive than bow and arrow, and may well be at least co-eval 

 with the stone celt ; and that Mr. Lovett has described fish 

 hooks made of thorns as still in use in Essex and on the French 

 coast. 



With regard to the first of these survivals it is well to 

 bear in mind the lesson, which Mr. Kipling has emphasized for 

 us in his Jungle Books, that the use of fire is undoubtedly one of 

 the most distinctive and most progressive prerogatives of man. 

 Fire existed, whether in the volcanic crater or lava-flow, or in 

 the lightning flash that might ignite the prairie, before the real 

 Prometheus brought it under human control. There still are 

 some Australian tribes who are ignorant of any means of re- 

 kindling a fire, having, if all their fires happen to become 

 extinguished, to obtain a fresh light from another settlement. 

 Perhaps folk-lorists might accept the suggestion even that the 

 sacred office of the Vestal Virgins, — and perhaps even more 

 persistent religious ceremonies, — preserve the memory of such a 

 stage in the advance from barbarism ; and it has been suggested 

 that the two crossed sticks, one of which is revolved in that wide- 

 spread instrument, the fire-drill, are the origin of that svastika 

 or cross which firgues as a sacred symbol in many diverse creeds." 



Until man took to protecting himself from some more 

 rigorous climate by the use of clothing, and invented a pocket, 

 much private property and the incentive which the ' magic of 

 ownership ' would give to painstaking shaping of stick or stone 

 implement would not exist. Theoretically the first ' implements ' 

 would be any stones to come to hand at the moment, to be used 

 only at the time ; then some selection of one better fitted by 

 Nature for the purpose in hand might be made ; and this, if man 

 had a pocket, might be treasured, as might also one upon which 

 some pains had been expended to shape it. 



The sharp edge of a shell picked up on the beach and the 

 broken bone of an animal that may even have died a natural 

 death, or especially those hard limb bones split longitudinally, as 

 even a jackal can do, for the sake of the marrow, suggest subsi 

 diary weapons ; whilst the stringy bark of a tree or the sinew of 



