(so)

V.

The Discovery of Fire.

[A Lecture delivered at the Museum Club at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, March 25, 1870.]

AMONG the blessings which man from the earliest times called his own, some are so indispensable to him, aye, so inseparable from his nature, that it is easier for him to believe he has possessed them from all time than to form any conception of how he may have acquired them. The most universal of these purely human blessings, language, still lies within the sphere of the forces of nature. If its possession by man ever had a beginning, it could only have come to him by nature, but could not have been discovered or invented by him. But it is different with those blessings that he owes to culture. Impossible as, for instance, it is to ascribe alphabetic writing to a conscious invention, seeing that such an invention would presuppose a superhuman wisdom by which the inventor perceived that all our speech is only a thousand-fold combination of twenty-four sounds; yet writing cannot have developed without the aid of reflection. Man is perhaps by nature a speaking being, certainly not a writing one. In a still higher degree this holds

good of material productions, of implements and tools with which the human race has supplied and improved its existence. Each of these implements must, in however rude a condition, have once become serviceable to man for the first time; the idea of its utility must once have dawned upon some generation or another; and however great the difference may be between a steamengine of our day and the earliest stone hammer, the being who for the first time armed his hand with such a tool, and in this way for the first time perhaps beat the kernel of a fruit out of its hard shell, must, it would appear, have felt within him a breath of that inspiration which a discoverer in our own time feels when a new idea flashes upon him. And in this sense, I suppose, we may venture to call the preparation of artificial fire an invention, a discovery, though the same rule applies to fire as to all the characteristically distinctive acquisitions of man as compared to the brute, viz., their being in fact too great, of too momentous consequences to the fortunes of the race, not to make it appear doubtful whether we may trace them back to a human origin, to a discovery of the human mind.

Fire belongs to those distinctive possessions of man, such as tools and implements, language and religion, without which we cannot conceive of humanity. All the reports about tribes who were said not to have any knowledge of it have proved fables, nay, inconceivable. But surely it is no less inconceivable for an animal to make fire itself, or even to avail itself of it. Its effect on the higher brute creation is terror;

the wolf, the lion, the elephant, are kept aloof from the encampments of man by fire. And if we admire in genius not only a superior intellectual endowment but the boldness of attempting to think of what has never been thought of by any one before, and to undertake what has never been done before, it was surely an act of genius when man approached the dreaded glow, when he bore the flame before him over the earth on the top of the ignited log of wood-an act of daring without a prototype in the animal world, and in its consequences for the development of human culture truly immeasurable. If antiquity beheld in that hero of the well-known legend, in Prometheus, who brought down fire from heaven, the author of all culture, we who live in the age of industry, we to whom fire is the substitute for millions of hands and horse power, will probably be inclined to rate such a boon still more highly. But in the domain of material progress we are too much accustomed to that great feat of man to think we need for the beginnings of the history of our civilisation the aid of gods or demigods; we rather seek for a motive which might in some measure resemble the powerful and intelligent industry of our times, and (singularly enough in the case of a thing having such an infinite variety of uses as fire) we shall be forced to acknowledge that such a motive, a practical reason for meditating the invention, or even for endeavouring to get possession of fire for practical application, can scarcely have existed in primeval times.

It is easy to think of an accidental impulse, perhaps

of an object set fire to by a flash of lightning or a forest-fire, which may for the first time have thrown the flame of itself, as it were, into the hands of man, who would then soon have learned to avail himself of it. But though little weight may be attached to the observation, it is notwithstanding to be taken into consideration that such accidents are least likely to have happened in those very places where there was most occasion for really making use of the fire thus presented to man. For it is precisely a warm climate or a hot temperature which particularly favours such accidents, and it hardly admits of doubt that the original home of the human race is to be looked for in hot regions, if not even in the torrid zone itself, in the vicinity of the equator. But what did he care there for the flame generated by lightning? No necessity rendered it worth his while to preserve it. It could not be the preparation of his food which made fire a desirable object to him; he must have for a long time subsisted without such preparation, and without the experience or any suspicion that fire might aid him in it. Naturalists are not agreed as to whether the earliest food of man was animal or merely vegetable, Historically and linguistically considered, I, for my own part, certainly deem it indubitable that, since man has been man, he has been carnivorous. It is perhaps not nature to which we may appeal when we kill animals for the purpose of our own preservation; it is perhaps only habit which makes this food appear indispensable to us at present. In ancient times, and

still more in India, serious objections were notoriously raised to it; and even among us, the more sympathisingly we try to understand the animal soul, the more regretfully we feel this habit to be repugnant to our more tender volition; but we cannot deny that it is at any rate a very old habit, as is evident from the circumstance that notions such as flesh, body, and perhaps animal too, almost everywhere proceed from that of food; that language, therefore, decidedly presupposes animal food, and that since any such words have existed at all such food must have been common.

Not only are our own word Fleisch and the English meat derived from roots signifying "to eat," but also the French word chair is so derived, though according to the present usage of the language it happens not to imply meat as food. The noble Greek word sarx, which forms the first component in "sarcophagus," originally meant nothing but a morsel picked off. When we speak of a sarcastic smile, we have no idea how this epithet can be connected with the sarx just mentioned, nor could the Greeks themselves tell. Sarcasm, properly speaking, is not the subtle irony which we designate by it; it is a grin, a distortion of the mouth, or a showing one's teeth, and this forms the transition to the idea of pulling at a piece of meat with the teeth, whence that designation meat, which has become quite honourable in Greek by usage, has developed. At Logon in Central Africa, tha means "food," thu "meat," and the "ox." Among other African tribes there exists only one word for meat and animal, and fish is called "water-flesh."