Industrial Biography | Page 8

of extreme rudeness to one showing great mechanical ingenuity.... In one of the canoes a beautifully polished celt or axe of greenstone was found; in the bottom of another a plug of cork, which, as Mr. Geikie remarks, 'could only have come from the latitudes of Spain, Southern France, or Italy.'"-- Sir C. LYELL, Antiquity of Man, 48-9. ...] Their smaller boats, or coracles, were made of osiers interwoven, covered with hides, and rigged with leathern sails and thong tackle.
It will readily be imagined that anything like civilization, as at present understood, must have been next to impossible under such circumstances. "Miserable indeed," says Carlyle, "was the condition of the aboriginal savage, glaring fiercely from under his fleece of hair, which with the beard reached down to his loins, and hung round them like a matted cloak; the rest of his body sheeted in its thick natural fell. He loitered in the sunny glades of the forest, living on wild fruits; or, as the ancient Caledonians, squatted himself in morasses, lurking for his bestial or human prey; without implements, without arms, save the ball of heavy flint, to which, that his sole possession and defence might not be lost, he had attached a long cord of plaited thongs; thereby recovering as well as hurling it with deadly, unerring skill."
The injunction given to man to "replenish the earth and subdue it" could not possibly be fulfilled with implements of stone. To fell a tree with a flint hatchet would occupy the labour of a month, and to clear a small patch of ground for purposes of culture would require the combined efforts of a tribe. For the same reason, dwellings could not be erected; and without dwellings domestic tranquillity, security, culture, and refinement, especially in a rude climate, were all but impossible. Mr. Emerson well observes, that "the effect of a house is immense on human tranquillity, power, and refinement. A man in a cave or a camp--a nomad--dies with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves. But so simple a labour as a house being achieved, his chief enemies are kept at bay. He is safe from the teeth of wild animals, from frost, sunstroke, and weather; and fine faculties begin to yield their fine harvest. Inventions and arts are born, manners, and social beauty and delight." But to build a house which should serve for shelter, for safety, and for comfort--in a word, as a home for the family, which is the nucleus of society--better tools than those of stone were absolutely indispensable.
Hence most of the early European tribes were nomadic: first hunters, wandering about from place to place like the American Indians, after the game; then shepherds, following the herds of animals which they had learnt to tame, from one grazing-ground to another, living upon their milk and flesh, and clothing themselves in their skins held together by leathern thongs. It was only when implements of metal had been invented that it was possible to practise the art of agriculture with any considerable success. Then tribes would cease from their wanderings, and begin to form settlements, homesteads, villages, and towns. An old Scandinavian legend thus curiously illustrates this last period: -- There was a giantess whose daughter one day saw a husbandman ploughing in the field. She ran and picked him up with her finger and thumb, put him and his plough and oxen into her apron, and carried them to her mother, saying, "Mother, what sort of beetle is this that I have found wriggling in the sand? " But the mother said, "Put it away, my child; we must begone out of this land, for these people will dwell in it."
M. Worsaae of Copenhagen, who has been followed by other antiquaries, has even gone so far as to divide the natural history of civilization into three epochs, according to the character of the tools used in each. The first was the Stone period, in which the implements chiefly used were sticks, bones, stones, and flints. The next was the Bronze period, distinguished by the introduction and general use of a metal composed of copper and tin, requiring a comparatively low degree of temperature to smelt it, and render it capable of being fashioned into weapons, tools, and implements; to make which, however, indicated a great advance in experience, sagacity, and skill in the manipulation of metals. With tools of bronze, to which considerable hardness could be given, trees were felled, stones hewn, houses and ships built, and agriculture practised with comparative facility. Last of all came the Iron period, when the art of smelting and working that most difficult but widely diffused of the minerals was discovered; from which point the progress made in all the arts of life has been of the