THE FIRE PISTON—BALFOUR. 585 
a very wide but very connected area in the east, amongst peoples 
relatively low in the scale of civilization. The primary question 
requiring solution is whether the fire piston has been transmitted 
from the one geographical area to the other, or whether it was inde- 
pendently arrived at in the two regions. We know that the prin- 
ciple of the method of producing heat by compression of air was 
discovered in England and France by scientific experiment, and that 
this principle was to some extent adapted to domestic use there, by 
the invention of the fire piston, so that it is at least clear that the 
European form was not derived from the east. Was, then, the 
eastern instrument a derivative from the western? ‘This question is 
not easily answered. On the one hand, the difficulty of explaining 
how native peoples, in a comparatively low condition of culture, 
could possibly have arrived independently at the knowledge requisite 
for the invention of this method of fire production is so great as 
almost to compel the belief that the instrument must have been intro- 
duced from elsewhere by some more highly cultured race. It must 
be remembered that it is only one hundred years ago last February 
that the first English patent was taken out by Lorentz for a fire 
piston, and that the scientific knowledge of this method of obtaining 
a spark dates only from a very few years earlier. This, among a 
people in the highest state of civilization and of scientific advance- 
ment. It seems almost incredible that so delicate and far from obvi- 
ous a method can have been discovered, whether by accident or by 
gradual development, by any of the eastern peoples amongst whom 
it has been found in use. At the same time, it must be admitted 
that this is the only serious difficulty which lies in the way of admit- 
ting the possibility of an independent origin in the two main regions 
of distribution. There is no inherent impossibility in such a double 
origin, cases of independent invention of similar appliances in widely 
separated regions having frequently arisen. There is no record of 
introduction by Europeans. 
There are, furthermore, considerable difficulties in accounting for 
the dispersal of the fire piston in the east, under the theory of its 
original introduction from Europe. From the earlier references we 
learn that prior to 1865 the fire piston was already well known in 
the east over a very extensive geographical area, embracing Burma, 
the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, and the “islands to the eastward of 
Java.” This is a wide range of distribution, and it would seem 
probable that considerable time would be required to account for 
this extensive dispersal, even if the instrument had been introduced 
by travelers from the west. If we choose to conjure up a picture 
of enterprising European voyagers in the earlier half of last cen- 
tury depositing supplies of fire pistons in various islands of the 
Malay Archipelago and on the mainland of southeastern Asia, we 
