HEROES OF INDUSTRY 



belong to modern times. Nor is this curious 

 circumstance merely an accident ; on the con- 

 trary, it affords an apt illustration of one of the 

 most striking and important of all the general 

 aspects of the history of civilization. It is not 

 true that industrial art is later in its beginnings 

 than the arts of warfare and statesmanship, or 

 than the inclination toward scientific inquiry. 

 In their most rudimentary beginnings all these 

 things were, no doubt, nearly simultaneous with 

 each other, as well as with art, religion, and 

 poetry. Pre-glacial men scratched outline pic- 

 tures of reindeer on their crude stone hammers ; 

 the first man who explained an eclipse as the 

 swallowing of the sun by a dragon, propounded 

 an hypothesis of the kind by which the begin- 

 nings of science and of theology are alike char- 

 acterized ; and poetry and music had their 

 humble origin in tales about the dead hero, and 

 rhythmical chants and dances in propitiation of 

 his ghost. And in like manner the ingenious 

 savage of primeval times who first discovered 

 that it was easier and safer to float across a river 

 on a log, if you hollowed out the log, was the 

 legitimate precursor of Fulton and Ericsson. 

 But the names of the clever men who invented 

 canoes and bows and arrows are as utterly un- 

 known to tradition as the names of the earliest 

 myth-makers, or of those pre-Homeric heroes 

 who won for the Aryan people the rich heritage 

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