science, clearly enough, seems the outgrowth of civilization; but
rightly considered, there is no contradiction. For, on the one
hand, man had ceased to be a barbarian long before the beginning
of what we call the historical period; and, on the other hand,
science, of a kind, is no less a precursor and a cause of
civilization than it is a consequent. To get this clearly in
mind, we must ask ourselves: What, then, is science? The word
runs glibly enough upon the tongue of our every-day speech, but
it is not often, perhaps, that they who use it habitually ask
themselves just what it means. Yet the answer is not difficult. A
little attention will show that science, as the word is commonly
used, implies these things: first, the gathering of knowledge
through observation; second, the classification of such
knowledge, and through this classification, the elaboration of
general ideas or principles. In the familiar definition of
Herbert Spencer, science is organized knowledge.

Now it is patent enough, at first glance, that the veriest savage
must have been an observer of the phenomena of nature. But it may
not be so obvious that he must also have been a classifier of his
observations--an organizer of knowledge. Yet the more we consider
the case, the more clear it will become that the two methods are
too closely linked together to be dissevered. To observe outside
phenomena is not more inherent in the nature of the mind than to
draw inferences from these phenomena. A deer passing through the
forest scents the ground and detects a certain odor. A sequence
of ideas is generated in the mind of the deer. Nothing in the
deer's experience can produce that odor but a wolf; therefore the
scientific inference is drawn that wolves have passed that way.
But it is a part of the deer's scientific knowledge, based on
previous experience, individual and racial; that wolves are
dangerous beasts, and so, combining direct observation in the
present with the application of a general principle based on past
experience, the deer reaches the very logical conclusion that it
may wisely turn about and run in another direction. All this
implies, essentially, a comprehension and use of scientific
principles; and, strange as it seems to speak of a deer as
possessing scientific knowledge, yet there is really no absurdity
in the statement. The deer does possess scientific knowledge;
knowledge differing in degree only, not in kind, from the
knowledge of a Newton. Nor is the animal, within the range of its
intelligence, less logical, less scientific in the application of
that knowledge, than is the man. The animal that could not make
accurate scientific observations of its surroundings, and deduce
accurate scientific conclusions from them, would soon pay the
penalty of its lack of logic.

What is true of man's precursors in the animal scale is, of
course, true in a wider and fuller sense of man himself at the
very lowest stage of his development. Ages before the time which
the limitations of our knowledge force us to speak of as the dawn
of history, man had reached a high stage of development. As a
social being, he had developed all the elements of a primitive
civilization. If, for convenience of classification, we speak of
his state as savage, or barbaric, we use terms which, after all,
are relative, and which do not shut off our primitive ancestors
from a tolerably close association with our own ideals. We know
that, even in the Stone Age, man had learned how to domesticate
animals and make them useful to him, and that he had also learned
to cultivate the soil. Later on, doubtless by slow and painful
stages, he attained those wonderful elements of knowledge that
enabled him to smelt metals and to produce implements of bronze,
and then of iron. Even in the Stone Age he was a mechanic of
marvellous skill, as any one of to-day may satisfy himself by
attempting to duplicate such an implement as a chipped
arrow-head. And a barbarian who could fashion an axe or a knife
of bronze had certainly gone far in his knowledge of scientific
principles and their practical application. The practical
application was, doubtless, the only thought that our primitive
ancestor had in mind; quite probably the question as to
principles that might be involved troubled him not at all. Yet,
in spite of himself, he knew certain rudimentary principles of
science, even though he did not formulate them.

Let us inquire what some of these principles are. Such an inquiry
will, as it were, clear the ground for our structure of science.
It will show the plane of knowledge on which historical
investigation begins. Incidentally, perhaps, it will reveal to us
unsuspected affinities between ourselves and our remote ancestor.
Without attempting anything like a full analysis, we may note in
passing, not merely what primitive man knew, but what he did not
know; that at least a vague notion may be gained of the field for
scientific research that lay open for historic man to cultivate.


It must be understood that the knowledge of primitive man, as we
are about to outline it, is inferential. We cannot trace the
development of these principles, much less can we say who
discovered them. Some of them, as already suggested, are man's
heritage from non-human ancestors. Others can only have been
grasped by him after he had reached a relatively high stage of
human development. But all the principles here listed must surely
have been parts of our primitive ancestor's knowledge before
those earliest days of Egyptian and Babylonian civilization, the
records of which constitute our first introduction to the
so-called historical period. Taken somewhat in the order of their
probable discovery, the scientific ideas of primitive man may be
roughly listed as follows:

1. Primitive man must have conceived that the earth is flat and


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