PREHISTORIC SCIENCE 



What is true of man's precursors in the animal scale 

 is, of course, true in a wider and fuller sense of man him- 

 self at the very lowest stage of his development. Ages 

 before the time which the limitations of our knowledge 

 force us to speak of as the dawn of history, man had 

 reached a high stage of development. As a social 

 being, he had developed all the elements of a primitive 

 civilization. If, for convenience of classification, we 

 speak of his state as savage, or barbaric, we use terms 

 which, after all, are relative, and which do not shut 

 off our primitive ancestors from a tolerably close asso- 

 ciation with our own ideals. We know that, even in 

 the Stone Age, man had learned how to domesticate 

 animals and make them useful to him, and that he had 

 also learned to cultivate the soil. Later on, doubtless 

 by slow and painful stages, he attained those wonder- 

 ful elements of knowledge that enabled him to smelt 

 metals and to produce implements of bronze, and then 

 of iron. Even in the Stone Age he was a mechanic of 

 marvellous skill, as any one of to-day may satisfy him- 

 self by attempting to duplicate such an implement as 

 a chipped arrow-head. And a barbarian who could 

 fashion an axe or a knife of bronze had certainly gone 

 far in his knowledge of scientific principles and their 

 practical application. The practical application was, 

 doubtless, the only thought that our primitive an- 

 cestor had in mind; quite probably the question as 

 to principles that might be involved troubled him not 

 at all. Yet, in spite of himself, he knew certain rudi- 

 mentary principles of science, even though he did not 

 formulate them. 



Let us inquire what some of these principles are. 



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