16 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
higher than an ape in the order of animated nature. He 
was also a carnivorous creature, hunted his prey in packs, and 
if he varied his diet of flesh it was only with wild fruits or 
roots. After awhile he learned the use of fire, and thus be- 
came a cook—that one thing which distinguishes man more 
prominently than anything else from every other animal. 
When he had acquired this art, he liked his meat better than 
he did before; this led to further reflections, and primitive 
man learned to pray—that is, to aspire, in the desire for 
further improvement of his lot, and seek means to that end. 
When man had become a cooking and a praying animal he 
was not far from discovering that two blades of grass could be 
made to grow where one had grown before. But to do this 
required much thought and work; he had to settle down to 
cultivate the ground successfully. The pursuits of the hunter 
are incompatible with the occupation of the farmer ; and one 
of the greatest strides which any people have ever taken 
from savagery toward civilization is that during which a 
nomadic, predatory tribe is transformed into tillers of the 
soil with fixed habitations. 
It is just at this turning-point in the development of human 
capacity for self-improvement that birds appear in a new 
light and take on new uses. To the wandering, hunting 
barbarian they were only objects of the chase, which he killed 
for food and clothing, as he did any other animal which 
could satisfy such primitive wants. He ate their flesh, and 
sucked their eggs, and sewed their skins to wear, and stuck 
their feathers in his hair to make himself look fine. Such 
barbarians are not all dead yet, nor of one sex only, nor con- 
fined to the tribes we call savage ; they are still in evidence, 
in our own midst, of our most primitive ape-ancestry. But 
very early in the art of agriculture observant and reflective 
farmers found insidious foes which often brought to naught 
the sweat of their brows. What to his hunting progenitors had 
been known only as a trifling annoyance, in buzzing and 
biting or stinging, offset in some cases by the morsels of food 
