336 



THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY 



depends for its effectiveness on muscular 

 skill is in that degree farther from an 

 invention in the cultural sense. An im- 

 perfect tool suffices; the congenital body 

 makes up the deficiency. If men had the 

 strength of arm and jaw of the great apes, 

 their enormous canine teeth, they would 

 no doubt have continued for a long time 

 to meet many situations with muscle 

 rather than with tools. 



The impulse to perform with his body 

 is strong in the cleverest chimpanzee; 

 performance with a tool is usually clumsy 

 and always an arduous act at first. Given 

 a suspended banana and an available pole, 

 the first impulse is to climb the pole before 

 it can fall and grasp at the fruit — a sort 

 of pole-vaulting. Sticks are brandished 

 threateningly in play combat. But let a 

 chimpanzee lose his temper, and he drops 

 his stick and plunges into attack with 

 hands and teeth. 



Nevertheless some use of tools is spon- 

 taneous. Stones are hurled. Sticks are 

 used to dig in play or for roots, to tease 

 fowls or other animals, to touch fire, 

 lizards, live wires, or other things that 

 provoke both curiosity and fear. In re- 

 moving filth from his body, the chimpan- 

 zee prefers a stick, chip, leaf, or rag, to 

 his fingers. He will lick up ants, or hold 

 out a straw for the ants to crawl on and 

 then lick them off. He has not been 

 observed, outside of posed problems, to 

 manufacture tools or to lay them aside 

 for the future; he does certainly, without 

 human stimulation, use simple tools that 

 come to hand, and use them in a way that 

 in a human being we should call intelligent. 



INVENTION AS A SYNTHESIS OR AS A COMPOSITE 



Sometimes an ape sits down in front of 

 a problem that has baffled him, detaches 

 himself from his previous efforts, and 

 looks the situation over, seemingly think- 

 ing. How far he may actually study the 



situation is difficult to say; but he cer- 

 tainly appears reflective. Suddenly then, 

 sometimes, the solution comes and is ap- 

 plied without hesitation or awkwardness. 

 Again, it may come overnight and with- 

 out warning. When a human being acts 

 in this manner we say that he has thought 

 the problem out. At any rate the ape's 

 solution tends to come as a whole, as an 

 abrupt synthesis. 



Now as we think of the course of human 

 culture, it may seem as if the layman con- 

 ceived of invention happening by syn- 

 theses like those of the chimpanzee, 

 whereas the social scientist tended in- 

 creasingly to view its history as one of 

 gradual accretion. Both are correct. 

 What we call an invention is nor- 

 mally a composite of many inventions 

 gradually assembled. Each unit inven- 

 tion, however, probably depends on one 

 insight made as a synthesis — a simple one, 

 mostly, but a synthesis. Popular imagi- 

 nation, with its love of the dramatic and 

 abhorrence of the analytic, transfers the 

 process operative in the unit to the en- 

 semble. It makes the printing press, the 

 steam engine, the telegraph, the radio, 

 spring like Pallas Athena in full panoply 

 from the head of some human Zeus. As 

 an explanation of what happened, this 

 is pure myth. The steam engine, the 

 telegraph, the automobile, are obvious 

 composites. They function as cultural 

 units, but the process of development of 

 each totality has been a complex and slow 

 one. An automobile represents literally 

 thousands of inventions. Its hundreds 

 of parts, like the screw and the cogs, have 

 each its history of successive stages, each 

 of which was in its time an invention. As 

 Gilfillan has recently shown, the reputed 

 inventor of every machine is regularly 

 that individual among a number of con- 

 temporaries who first made a given as- 

 semblage of existing inventions pay. In 



