THE EVOLUTION OF ARMS AND ARMOR.* 



It is a well proclaimed, though not always a well prac- 

 tised maxim of good citizenship, that the legislator, the 

 reformer, the political economist, the voter, everybody who 

 is to have anything to do with discussing and directing the 

 affairs of society and the State, ought to have, as a prep- 

 aration for it, a knowledge of history, that is, of what 

 other men in other days have done and have tried to do in 

 the same great fields. Equally important is it, also, as we 

 are now beginning to see, that such persons should have, as 

 a requisite for their fullest intelligent action, a like ac- 

 quaintance with science, and especially with those depart- 

 ments of science, as zoology and palaeontology, which 

 relate to what animals and plants have done, and with their 

 great interpreter, Evolution. Human history is but the 

 last chapter in a vast volume, many chaptered, of the 

 world's transactions, impossible to be understood without 

 reading in its preceding ones what our ancestors older tlian 

 man have been doing; human society, as Mr. Spencer has 

 so admirably shown in his Principles of Sociology, is but 

 the enlargement and further development of organisms 

 spread all through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, on 

 which Nature has been at work for millions of years. Tlie 

 root and germ not only of man's body, as seen in the oldest 

 vertebrate fossils, but of man's mind, and of all that mind 

 does and can do both individually and socially, have existed 

 in the world's great life-tree from the start, must have 

 done so, according to Evolution, and have been continu- 

 ally unfolding themselves, if not at first as flower and fruit, 

 yet long ago as shoot and stalk. There is hardly an 

 experiment humanity is now trying in mechanics, art, gov- 

 ernment, labor, capital, education, sociology, and even eccle- 

 siasticism, some of them with its own children as the 

 materials, that Xature has not already tried at least the 

 principles of, over and over, in the cruder forms of matter, 

 and with the cheaper materials of animal and vegetable 



CorvKKJHT, 1890, l)y James H. West. 



