The Kvolution of Amus and Armor. 173 



pay patient human fingers to feed them day after day with 

 imported Paris-green ? And how smilingly the serried 

 ranks of the corn-field can straighten up their own spines 

 and use their green blades only to parry the sunshine, 

 while the farmer and his boy bend, their aching backs and 

 ply their sharp hoes at their roots to drive away and put 

 to death, as no skill in themselves could, their thousand 

 weed-foes ? 



Ascending now into the kingdom of man himself, the 

 evolution of what has played such an important part in 

 the animal and vegetable worlds has certainly not been less 

 prominent or less interesting in that of their head, and in his 

 struggle for life. ^' Arma viriimque cano,'^ not unnatur- 

 ally did the old Latin poet put the two together as themes to 

 be unitedly sung ; the ar'ma perhaps logically first, as some- 

 thing without which man, surrounded with the savage wild, 

 and so weak in himself, never could have been man. His 

 earliest weapons may indeed have been the nature-given 

 ones that he had in his brute-estate, fists, nails and teeth, 

 the ones that, in all emergencies, he falls back upon still, 

 mingled perhaps with the bare sticks and stones that he 

 picked up in the woods, 



" Anna antiqiia mantis, ungues, dentesque fiiere 

 Et lapides et item silvarum fragmina, rami,'''' 



as wise Lucretius has it. But when, as our great anthropoid 

 ancestor^ he came down out of his tree-life, he had, in his 

 fingers able to grasp a club, the fingers which his fore- 

 limbs, in grasping the tree, had developed into, some- 

 thing far better with which to meet his foes than the claws 

 with which he went up into it ; and he has not been slow 

 to use his new powers. From grasping clubs and stones he 

 has gone on to grasping repeating-rifles and dynamite-shells. 

 There is no chapter of human progress more interesting and 

 impressive than that of its arms-making, unless it be that 

 of its arms-using. All tne resources of art, all the illumi- 

 nations of science, have for ages been brought to bear upon 

 it. Some of the most honored names of antiquity, though 

 forgotten now, as those of Luno, Galen, and Andrea Ferrara, 

 were the names of sword-makers and armorers. It was an 

 occupation not considered unworthy of an Olympian god ; 

 and one of the most brilliant pages of Homer is the de- 



