2 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [N.S., XII, 



ledge. Nowadays fire seems a simple thing. A handful of 



sticks, a few dry leaves, or a piece of paper, or some fine twigs 



perhaps, and possibly some coal, are the essentials. Nor must 



the matches be overlooked, and then there is the blazing fire, 



ready to cook man's food or to warm him when he is cold. It 



is a necessity for existence, and knowledge of its utilisation 



might almost be termed of the axiomatic order. When the fire 



dies down and the coldness grows, it is so easy to add a few 



more sticks or another piece or two of coal to make the fire 



blaze up again, and again to give warmth. But is it all so 



simple , that addition of another stick ? The dog or the cat 



will stretch itself before the fire and get warm but will never 



think of replenishing the fire as it grows low. A trick dog 



might be trained to do so, perhaps, or an imitative monkey, 



but that presupposes a teacher. 



In the days of primitive man, there was no teacher save 

 necessity, and though necessity may be urgent, she is not very 

 audible in her manner of giving advice. Early man must 

 be conceived as approximating closely to the animal in his 

 deductive and inductive powers and in his easy forgetfulness. 

 Or perhaps he might have been compared in those respects to 

 a young child, just passed the days of infancy. Give such a 

 child some sweets, stuck in the bottom of a bottle, with a neck 

 too small to admit his hand. He enjoys the noise of banging 

 the bottle on the floor. If, perchance a sweet falls out, he en- 

 joys that also, but it takes a long time to associate the extrac- 

 tion of the sweet with the pounding performance. It is a still 

 further advance to utilise a stick to prise out a sweet when the 

 hammering fails. Ten minutes afterwards, he has forgotten 

 how to use the stick, and has to rediscover it many times be- 

 fore it is part of his mental equipment. 



Much in the same condition was man millions of years ago. 

 He threw a stick on a fire and it blazed up again. That did not 

 appeal to him as a case of cause and effect. Probably he 

 straightway forgot that he had thrown the stick and would 

 stand glowering at the red but dying fire, which had warmed 

 him, or which perhaps had rendered him service. Or he might 

 pelt the fire with green branches or even stones, oblivious of 

 the essentials of combustibility. To keep a fire alight is be- 

 yond the power of any animal or child, until certain imitative 

 or reasoning powers have been developed. So it must have 

 been with early man. This point is reiterated because the 

 "invention 5 * of fire involved so many stages, each of which 

 must, in the intellectual development of that day, be imagined 

 as constituting an enormous advance. Consider a few of the 

 steps. 



First there was the appreciation of the fact that fire was 

 good for anything. Next came the ability to control a fire, to 

 keep it alight within proper bounds. Afterwards followed the 



