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النشر الإلكتروني

CHAPTER III

THE CONTROL OF NATURE

Man's earliest arms were fingers, teeth, and nails,
And stones and fragments from the branching woods;
Then copper next: and last, as latest traced,
The tyrant, iron.

- LUCRETIUS.

Man's belief that he is to dominate this earth has never been better expressed than by the poet who first wrote the words: "And God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." When His Highness, the Elephant, walks down the street of some Indian village, no person challenges his right of way. With one accord he is given a clear road. Yet on his back is a man, diminutive by comparison, to whose orders the giant is obedient. In this simple incident we have an epitome of history. Man is by no means one of the largest and strongest animals of earth. Yet today he is the master. Existence depends upon the use of the facilities offered by nature. Civilization depends upon the direction or control of these facilities for man's benefit. We must be on guard lest we overemphasize the degree of our mastery. By control we really mean the use of the materials of nature to accomplish our ends. We cannot change the law of gravity but we can utilize it to make the weight run the clock or the balloon to rise. We cannot cause the wind to blow nor prevent it but we can make it run the windmill and grind the corn or drive the sail boat. Our control over large animals is based on our intellectual superiority, for if the elephant bolts or the horse runs we are physically almost helpless.

It is hard for us to realize that for long ages this dominance did not exist. We must picture primitive man as living in groups, feeding on fruits, nuts, insects, shellfish or other easily obtained foods. Once in a while a whale might be cast on the shore or an elephant killed by accident and thus man be given an unexpected feast. As a rule when the wild beasts appeared man sought safety in flight, not infrequently in vain. If food was abundant he grew fat, if scanty he starved. For him, as for us today, the first steps in any direction must have been the most difficult. The discovery of the possibilities of the stone or club marked a great epoch. Crude as these weapons are, they mark the beginnings of the control over nature on which civilization depends. It shows how far we have lost sight of fundamentals in that we no longer honor him who first made fire by rubbing two sticks together, and made possible the torch to show the path, the heat for house and body, the change from raw to cooked food.

After man invented the drill and bow drill for making fire, long ages passed ere he secured easier methods. Until the nineteenth century flint and steel were commonly used. The word match was originally used to indicate the hemp or other fiber which carried the flame to the oil or powder.

In 1680 Haukwitz and Boyle used phosphorus ignited by friction to light splints of wood dipped in sulphur. This was rather dangerous. In 1805 Chancel, at Paris, devised the scheme of keeping asbestos soaked in sulphuric acid in a bottle into which a sulphur-coated stick tipped with chlorate of potash and sugar was dipped, the fire resulting from chemical action. In 1827 Walker, of England, invented a friction match and in 1833 the common phosphorous friction match appeared in several places, notably Vienna. The first safety matches were made in 1852 in Sweden.

...

"The physical forces and mechanical powers were at first unknown and entirely useless to both man and woman. Only gradually were they brought within the area of intelligence and control. Savages know an inclined plane, the wedge, lever, a lubricant, a roller, the pulley, in the crude form, but not the wheel in any of its combinations. Chief of all should we keep in mind the flywheel on the spindle, the first device ever made by human beings for converting rectilinear into circular motion." 1 Gladstone called the wheel the most wonderful of man's inventions, for there was nothing in nature to suggest it. The bow and arrow must be regarded as one of the greatest inventions of all ages. We shall never know to what race, era, or continent these early inventors belonged; nor whether the devices were worked out in one place and then copied all over earth, or rediscovered in various places by many persons. Nevertheless, we owe endless gratitude to those unknown inventors in the dim, gray dawn of history who made possible the first upward steps.

Many of man's early discoveries, like many of the later, were quite accidental; others were suggested to him by animals. Long before he thought of doing things himself, he had found the honeycombs of the bees, had seen hawks catching fish, had marveled at the delicacy of the spider's web and understood its purpose and had investigated the

1 MASON, O. T. Woman's Share in Primitive Culture, p. 279.

paper nest of the hornet and been received with unexpected warmth. He had robbed the squirrels of their nuts, had dug open the ants' nests and had seen the ponds constructed by beavers. All of these animals had modified their world to some extent to meet their own needs. Many had dug holes in earth or trees. The stickleback and other fish had made nests. Birds, like the cowbird and European cuckoo, deposited their eggs in bird orphan asylums, unwittingly conducted by other species, and left the labor of hatching and rearing to the foster parents. Some, like the turtle dove and American cuckoo, were satisfied to make a loose flimsy framework of sticks as apologies for nests; while others, like the Baltimore oriole, were expert weavers. From these and the endless other examples before him, man must have gotten invaluable hints and suggestions. We must realize that each step led not merely to better methods of living, but also created a keener intellectual appreciation of the possibilities of the situation and thus stimulated discovery.

Why all groups of men have not equally profited from these lessons must be elsewhere considered. As we glance over the peoples on earth today we find that they may be roughly classified in accordance with their dominant pursuits as hunters or fishers, herdsmen, farmers and manufacturers. That none of them quite correspond to primitive man is shown by the fact that they all have tools and weapons and understand the art of fire making. It was formerly supposed that the entire human race had passed through these stages in the order named. Now that we realize that man has been on earth much longer than was formerly supposed and knows more about the various peoples, it seems likely that his forward march has been guided by his physical opportunities in large

measure.

The Japanese became agriculturists (as did the Hopi Indians) without domestic animals, and now are becoming in a few years skilled manufacturers because of contact with Western peoples. The Navajos were agriculturists and hunters; after the Spanish introduced the sheep, they became herdsmen.

Whenever man made a new invention, or discovered some method of bettering himself, he did one of two things: either he provided some sort of insurance against a time of need (as by storing food) or else he extended his own powers in time and space. He could kill a rabbit with a club or even run down a deer, perchance, but the bow and arrow brought great saving of effort and made his strength effective for one or two hundred yards, thus radically changing the nature of his contest with other animals. Every such saving of time and effort increased his productive ability, enabled him to have leisure for other activities and made possible the production of surplus wealth. Sad experience taught him that the arrow shot from the bow could not always be found or used again. In some such way he discovered the great truth that wealth is made to be used and so is soon destroyed and must be replaced. Even his most permanent and substantial buildings seldom last a century, and then only with constant repair. When the development had gone far enough, he gradually changed from casual to regular labor; but long ere this day dawned, his standards were relatively high. Thus he finds that wealth is the material basis for civilization and a work ideal replaces one of pleasure.

Whenever man has gone to any region of earth in which it was possible for man to exist, he has found other men already on the ground. This wide distribution, greater than that of any other of the higher animals has been

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