462 EARLY MAN 



Our imagination may carry us yet a little farther with reference 

 to his fortunes. If he needed any weapon to repel aggressive 

 enemies, a stick or club would serve his purpose, or perhaps a 

 stone thrown from his hand. Soon, however, he might learn 

 from the pain caused by the sharp flints that lay in his path the 

 cutting power of an edge, and, armed with a flint chip held 

 in the hand, or fitted into a piece of wood, he would become 

 an artificer of many things useful and pleasing. As he wan- 

 dered into more severe climates, where vegetable food could 

 not be obtained throughout the year, and as he observed the 

 habits of beasts and birds of prey, he would learn to be 

 a hunter and a fisherman, and to cook animal food ; and with 

 this would come new habits, wants and materials, as well as a 

 more active and energetic mode of life. He would also have 

 to make new weapons and implements, axes, darts, harpoons, 

 and scrapers for skins, and bodkins or needles to make skin 

 garments. He would use chipped flint where this could be 

 procured, and failing this, splintered and rubbed slate, and for 

 some uses, bone and antler. Much ingenuity would be used 

 in shaping these materials, and in the working of bone, antler 

 and wood, ornament would begin to be studied. In the mean- 

 time the hunter, though his weapons improved, would become 

 a ruder and more migratory man, and in anger, or in the desire 

 to gain some coveted object, might begin to use his weapons 

 against his brother man. In some more favoured localities, 

 however, he might attain to a more settled life ; and he, or more 

 likely the woman his helpmeet, might contrive to tame some 

 species of animals, and to begin some culture of the soil. 



It was probably in this early time that metals first attracted 

 the attention of men. The ages of stone, bronze, and 

 iron believed in by some archaeologists, are more or less 

 mythical to the geologist, who knows that these things depend 

 more on locality and on natural products than on stages of 

 culture. The analogy of America teaches us that the use of 



