with our primeval ancestor if we recall that in the attempt to
explain this fact of terrestrial gravitation Newton made no
advance, and we of to-day are scarcely more enlightened than the
man of the Stone Age. Like the man of the Stone Age, we know that
an arrow shot into the sky falls back to the earth. We can
calculate, as he could not do, the arc it will describe and the
exact speed of its fall; but as to why it returns to earth at
all, the greatest philosopher of to-day is almost as much in the
dark as was the first primitive bowman that ever made the
experiment.

Other physical facts going to make up an elementary science of
mechanics, that were demonstratively known to prehistoric man,
were such as these: the rigidity of solids and the mobility of
liquids; the fact that changes of temperature transform solids to
liquids and vice versa--that heat, for example, melts copper and
even iron, and that cold congeals water; and the fact that
friction, as illustrated in the rubbing together of two sticks,
may produce heat enough to cause a fire. The rationale of this
last experiment did not receive an explanation until about the
beginning of the nineteenth century of our own era. But the
experimental fact was so well known to prehistoric man that he
employed this method, as various savage tribes employ it to this
day, for the altogether practical purpose of making a fire; just
as he employed his practical knowledge of the mutability of
solids and liquids in smelting ores, in alloying copper with tin
to make bronze, and in casting this alloy in molds to make
various implements and weapons. Here, then, were the germs of an
elementary science of physics. Meanwhile such observations as
that of the solution of salt in water may be considered as giving
a first lesson in chemistry, but beyond such altogether
rudimentary conceptions chemical knowledge could not have
gone--unless, indeed, the practical observation of the effects of
fire be included; nor can this well be overlooked, since scarcely
another single line of practical observation had a more direct
influence in promoting the progress of man towards the heights of
civilization.

4. In the field of what we now speak of as biological knowledge,
primitive man had obviously the widest opportunity for practical
observation. We can hardly doubt that man attained, at an early
day, to that conception of identity and of difference which Plato
places at the head of his metaphysical system. We shall urge
presently that it is precisely such general ideas as these that
were man's earliest inductions from observation, and hence that
came to seem the most universal and "innate" ideas of his
mentality. It is quite inconceivable, for example, that even the
most rudimentary intelligence that could be called human could
fail to discriminate between living things and, let us say, the
rocks of the earth. The most primitive intelligence, then, must
have made a tacit classification of the natural objects about it
into the grand divisions of animate and inanimate nature.
Doubtless the nascent scientist may have imagined life animating
many bodies that we should call inanimate--such as the sun,
wandering planets, the winds, and lightning; and, on the other
hand, he may quite likely have relegated such objects as trees to
the ranks of the non-living; but that he recognized a fundamental
distinction between, let us say, a wolf and a granite bowlder we
cannot well doubt. A step beyond this--a step, however, that may
have required centuries or millenniums in the taking--must have
carried man to a plane of intelligence from which a primitive
Aristotle or Linnaeus was enabled to note differences and
resemblances connoting such groups of things as fishes, birds,
and furry beasts. This conception, to be sure, is an abstraction
of a relatively high order. We know that there are savage races
to-day whose language contains no word for such an abstraction as
bird or tree. We are bound to believe, then, that there were long
ages of human progress during which the highest man had attained
no such stage of abstraction; but, on the other hand, it is
equally little in question that this degree of mental development
had been attained long before the opening of our historical
period. The primeval man, then, whose scientific knowledge we are
attempting to predicate, had become, through his conception of
fishes, birds, and hairy animals as separate classes, a
scientific zoologist of relatively high attainments.

In the practical field of medical knowledge, a certain stage of
development must have been reached at a very early day. Even
animals pick and choose among the vegetables about them, and at
times seek out certain herbs quite different from their ordinary
food, practising a sort of instinctive therapeutics. The cat's
fondness for catnip is a case in point. The most primitive man,
then, must have inherited a racial or instinctive knowledge of
the medicinal effects of certain herbs; in particular he must
have had such elementary knowledge of toxicology as would enable
him to avoid eating certain poisonous berries. Perhaps, indeed,
we are placing the effect before the cause to some extent; for,
after all, the animal system possesses marvellous powers of
adaption, and there is perhaps hardly any poisonous vegetable
which man might not have learned to eat without deleterious
effect, provided the experiment were made gradually. To a certain
extent, then, the observed poisonous effects of numerous plants
upon the human system are to be explained by the fact that our
ancestors have avoided this particular vegetable. Certain fruits
and berries might have come to have been a part of man's diet,
had they grown in the regions he inhabited at an early day, which
now are poisonous to his system. This thought, however, carries
us too far afield. For practical purposes, it suffices that
certain roots, leaves, and fruits possess principles that are
poisonous to the human system, and that unless man had learned in


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