THE CONQUEST OF NATURE 



revolutionary in its effects upon society, as these later 

 inventions which we have just named. To attempt 

 to define them clearly is to enter the field of uncertainty, 

 but two or three conjectures may be hazarded that 

 cannot be very wide of the truth. 



It is clear, for example, that if we go back in imagi- 

 nation to the very remotest ancestors of man that can 

 be called human, we must suppose a vast and revo- 

 lutionary stage of progress to have been ushered in by 

 the first race of men that learned to make habitual use 

 of the simplest implement, such as a mere club. When 

 man had learned to wield a club and to throw a stone, 

 and to use a stone held in the hand to break the shell 

 of a nut, he had attained a stage of culture which augured 

 great things for the future. Out of the idea of wielded 

 club and hurled stone were to grow in time the ideas 

 of hammer and axe and spear and arrow. 



Then there came a time no one dare guess how 

 many thousands of years later when man learned to 

 cover his body with the skin of an animal, and thus 

 to become in a measure freed from the thraldom of 

 the weather. He completed his enfranchisement by 

 learning to avail himself of the heat provided by an 

 artificial fire. Equipped with these two marvelous 

 inventions he was able to extend the hitherto narrow 

 bounds of his dwelling-place, passing northward to 

 the regions which at an earlier stage of his development 

 he dared not penetrate. Under stress of more exhil- 

 arating climatic conditions, he developed new ideals 

 and learned to overcome new difficulties; developing 

 both a material civilization and the advanced mentality 



[10] 



