328 INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



duplicate ratio, the power of the opposing influences dimin 

 ishes in a duplicate ratio; and hence the fact that at the 

 outset it took a thousand years to achieve a degree of im 

 provement which is now achieved in one year. 



As aids to teeth and hands, the primitive man had nothing 

 beyond such natural products as lay around him boulders, 

 shells collected on the beach, bones, horns and teeth from 

 the animals he had killed or found dead, branches torn 

 from trees by storms. Koughly speaking, sticks and stones 

 were his tools, and the sticks were necessarily unshapen ; for 

 he had nothing wherewith to cut their ends or smooth their 

 surfaces. As alleged by General Pitt-Rivers, and shown by 

 his collection, the stick was the parent of a group of imple 

 ments diggers, clubs, spears, boomerangs, throwing-sticks, 

 shields, paddles; and only in courses of ages did the un 

 imaginative savage produce these derived forms. Little by 

 little he discovered how a stick or club, accidentally diverg 

 ing in one or other direction from the average shape, served 

 better for a special purpose; and he thereafter chose such 

 sticks or clubs for such purposes : eventually falling into the 

 habit of shaping fit pieces of wood into the fit forms. 



Even this small advance was rendered possible only by the 

 aid of rude tools, first for scraping and by and by for cutting ; 

 and the production of such tools took place almost insensibly 

 during long periods. How many thousands of years back 

 the Stone Age extends we do not know; but the roughly 

 chipped flints found in geological deposits and in caves con 

 taining remains of extinct animals, imply great antiquity. 

 Collisions of stones, now and then leaving edges fit for 

 scraping with, and sometimes fit for cutting with, doubtless 

 gave the first hints; and out of the breaking of many flints 

 to get good pieces, grew, in the hands of the more skilful, the 

 art of splitting off flakes with sharp edges, sometimes leaving 

 a large sharp-edged core, also useful as a rough tool. From 

 these forms, slowly differentiating from one another like the 

 wooden implements, came definitely formed scrapers, notched 



