Our original ancestors dwelt in caves and wildernesses; had no sewed or fabricated clothing of any kind; subsisted on roots and nuts and berries; possessed no arts of any sort; were ignorant to a degree that we cannot imagine, and were little above the brutes in their mode of living. Today, a considerable fraction of the people who dwell upon the earth enjoy a civilization so fine that it seems to have no connection with the brutish conditions of primeval life. Yet, as these pages show, a perfectly plain series of inventions can be seen, starting from the old conditions and building up the new.

The progress of man during the countless ages of prehistoric times is hidden from our knowledge, except in so far as it has been revealed to us by ruins of ancient cities, by prehistoric utensils of many kinds, and by inscriptions carved on monuments and tablets. The sharp dividing line between prehistoric times and historic times, seems to be that made by the art of writing; for this epochal invention rendered possible the recording of events, and the consequent beginning of history.

Of prehistoric times we have, of course, no written record; and we have but the most general means of estimating how many millenniums ago man first had his being. Geological considerations indicate a beginning so indefinitely and exceedingly remote that the imagination may lose itself in speculations as to his mode of living during those forever-hidden centuries that dragged along, before man had advanced so far in his progress toward civilization as to make and use the rude utensils which the researches of antiquarians have revealed.

Inasmuch as the most important employment of man from his first breath until his last has always been the struggle to preserve his life; inasmuch as the endeavor of primeval man to defend himself against wild beasts must have been extremely bitter (for many were larger and stronger than he), and inasmuch as man eventually achieved the mastery over them, one seems forced to conclude that man overcame wild beasts by employing some means to assist his bodily strength, and that probably his first invention was a weapon.

The first evidences of man's achievements that we have are rude implements of stone and flint, evidently shaped by some force guided by some intelligence;—doubtless the force of human hands, guided by the intelligence of human minds. Many such have been found in caves and gravel-beds over all the world. They were rough and crude, and indicate a rough and crude but nevertheless actual stage of civilization. Some call this the Old Stone Age and others call it the Early Stone Age. Besides stone and flint, bones, horns and tusks were used. Among the implements made were daggers, fish-hooks, needles, awls and heads of arrows and harpoons. One of the most interesting revelations of those rude and immeasurably ancient implements is the fact that man, even in those times, possessed the artistic sense; for on some of them can be seen rough but clear engravings of natural objects, and even of wild animals.

How the bow and arrow came to be invented we have no intimation. The invention of the club and spear did not probably involve much creative effort, so simple were those instruments, and so like the branches that could be broken from the trees. Yet, to the untrained mind of the primeval savage, the idea of sharpening a straight branch of wood into a fine point at the end, in order that penetration through the skin might be facilitated, must have come as an inspiration. No such thing as a spear exists as a spear in nature, and therefore the making of a spear was a creative act. To us, the use of the spear as a projectile may not seem to have required the inventive faculty—unless the hurling of stones may also be supposed to have required it. It may be, however, that with the dull mind of primeval men, even the idea of using stones or javelins as projectiles was the result of a distinct, and perhaps startling inspiration.

The invention of the bow and arrow was one of the first order of brilliancy, and would be so even now. It is not easy to think of any simple accident as accounting for the invention; because the bow and arrow consists of three entirely independent parts—the straight bar of wood, the string, and the arrow; for the bow was not a bow until the string had been fastened to each end, and drawn so tight that the bar of wood was forced into a bent shape, and held there at great tension. When one realizes this, and realizes in addition the countless centuries during which the bow and arrow held its sway, the millions of men who have used it, and the important effect it has had in the overcoming of wild beasts, and the deciding of many of the critical battles of the world, he can hardly escape the conclusion that the invention of the bow and arrow was one of the most important occurrences in the history of mankind.

A still more important occurrence was the invention of making fire. Probably less inventive effort was needed for this than for the bow and arrow; for fire could be seen in the lightning and in trees struck by lightning, and in the sparks that came forth when two hard stones were struck together. The discovery of fire may have been made by accident; but this does not mean that no invention was needed for devising and producing the means whereby fire could be produced at will. To note the fact of a phenomenon, say the production of fire when stones are accidentally struck together, or the falling of an apple from a tree, requires no special effort, and of itself brings forth no benefit; but to reason from the appearance of the sparks to the production of an apparatus for making fire at will; or to reason from the falling of an apple to the enunciation of Newton's Law of Gravitation, is the kind of successful mental effort that has produced the effects which it is the endeavor of this humble book to indicate. These effects have combined as progress has advanced, to put civilized man in a position relatively to his natural surroundings very different from that held by primeval man, and very different from that held by the brutes, both in primeval days and now. Evidently, the effects have been made possible by some faculty possessed by man and not by brutes. This faculty is usually called reason, and is held to be a faculty by means of which man can infer cause from effect, and effect from cause, and can remember events and facts to a degree sufficient to enable him to hold them in his mind, while reasoning about them.

But it seems impossible to explain the advent of even the oldest and simplest inventions by the possession of reason only, using the word reason in its ordinary sense; for it is obvious that no matter how clearly a man could reason as between cause and effect, no matter how great a student of all phenomena he might be, no matter how good a memory he might have, he might nevertheless live for many years and never invent anything. In fact, we see men at the present day who possess great knowledge, splendid energy, keen powers of analysis, high courage, and even great administrative talent, and yet who are obviously deficient in originality, who seem to possess the constructive faculty in only a small degree, and who seem incapable of taking any step forward except on paths that have been plainly trod before.

Countless instances can be cited of the persistence of men, even in civilized lands, in following a certain practice for long periods, until someone possessing the inventive faculty has devised a better one. For the sake of brevity, only two cases, and those well known, will be mentioned as illustrative. One was the invention of movable type, and the other that of pointing the wood screw. Man had continued for centuries to make blocks of wood or other material on which words and phrases were engraved or cut, and then to print from them. Suddenly a man in Germany (usually said to be John Guttenberg) made the change, so slight in appearance and yet so tremendous in results, of cutting only one letter on a block, and arranging and securing the blocks in such a way as to enable him to print any word or words desired. This did not occur until about the year 1434 A.D. Why had not someone done this in all the long centuries? Surely it was not because men of great reasoning faculties had not lived; for in the long interval the civilization of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome had flourished; and Plato, Aristotle, CÆsar and the great inventor Archimedes had lived! Similarly, men continued to use in wood the same flat pointed screw that they used in metals, boring the hole first in the wood with a gimlet, and then entering the flat point of the screw into the hole. Suddenly (but not until the nineteenth century A. D.) an inventor made and patented a screw which came to a sharp point like a gimlet, which could be forced into wood just as the gimlet was, and then screwed into the wood without further ado. How can we explain the curious fact that countless men of reason, intelligence and mechanical skill had continued century after century to bore into wood with gimlets, and then follow the gimlet with flat-pointed screws?

The explanation seems to be expressed in the phrase, "the idea had not occurred to them." Why had it not occurred to them? This question cannot, of course, be answered convincingly; but it may be pointed out that there is a small class of men to whom original ideas seem to come of their own accord. The inventor of mechanical appliances is in this class, and is perhaps its most conspicuous exemplar.

It may be pointed out, however, that the inventors of mechanical appliances are not the only men to whom original conceptions come; for original conceptions evidently come to the poets, the novelists, the musical composers, the artists, the strategists, the explorers, the statesmen, the philosophers, the founders of religions and the initiators of all enterprises great and small. It may be pointed out also that their mental processes are similar, and that they are best described by the greatest of all poets in the lines—

These lines suggest that the first step in invention is made almost without effort; that a picture, confused and dim but actual, is made by the imagination on the mental retina; and that, after that, the constructive faculties arrange the elements of the picture in such wise as to produce a clear and definite entity.

Regarded in this way, the inventor of mechanical appliances suddenly sees a confused and dim picture of an instrument or a mechanism (or a part of it) that he has never seen with his bodily eyes; the musical composer hears imperfectly and vaguely a new musical composition; the sculptor sees a statue, the painter sees a new combination of objects and colors producing a new effect, and the poet feels the stirring in him of vague, but beautiful, or powerful or inspiring thoughts. If now the picture is allowed to fade, or if the constructive faculty is not able to make it into an actuality, or if the picture has not in itself the elements which the state of civilization then prevailing make it possible to embody in an entity, no invention of a mechanical appliance is made, no plan of campaign, no musical composition, no statue, no painting, no poem is produced.

If, however, the constructive effort develops successfully the conception that the imagination made, and if the circumstances of time and place are all propitious, then the art of making fire at will is born, or Bonaparte's suggestion at Toulon is made, or the strains of Beethoven's music inspire the world, or the statue of Moses is carved, or the Immaculate Conception is pointed, or Hamlet is written, or the electric telegraph binds the peoples of the earth together.

The inventor in mechanics, the sculptor, the painter, the novelist and the poet embody their creations in material forms that are enduring and definite, and constitute evidences of their work, which sometimes endure throughout long periods. The architect and the constructing engineer are able similarly to produce lasting and useful monuments to their skill; but it can hardly be declared that their work is characterized by quite so much of originality and invention, because of the restrictions by which the practice of their arts is bound. It is, in fact, hard to conceive of a bridge very different in principle or design from bridges that had been built before; and while it is not difficult to conceive of an engine different in principle and design from previous ones, yet we realize that the points of novelty in such an engine would be attributable more to invention than to engineering. This is because the arts of engineering and architecture rest on principles that have long since been proved to be correct, and on practices that are the results of long experience; whereas one of the main characteristics of invention is novelty.

It is true that many of the most important inventions have been made by engineers; but this has been because some engineers, like Ericsson, have been inventors also. But it is also true that only a small proportion of the engineers have made original inventions; and it is equally true that many inventions have failed—or have been slow in achieving success—because of lack of engineering skill in construction or design. These facts show that the work of the inventor is very different from that of the engineer, and that the inventor and the engineer are very different people, though an engineer and an inventor sometimes live together inside of the same skin. In fact, it is by a combination of inventive genius and engineering talent in one man that the greatest results in invention have been achieved; though great results have often followed the intimate cooperation of an inventor and an engineer, the two being separate men.

It is in the latter way that important advances have usually been made; and it is somewhat analogous to the way in which authors and publishers, actors and managers, promoters and capitalists cooperate.

But while the individuals whose inventions have taken the form of new creations, such as novel machines and books and paintings, have received the clearest recognition as men of genius, may not the inventive faculty be needed in other fields and be required in other kinds of work? If an instrument is produced by the joint exercise of imagination and constructive talent, is not every puzzle worked out, and every problem solved, and every constructive work accomplished by the similar exercise of those same faculties?

It may seem obvious that this question should be answered in the negative, and so it unquestionably should be. But there always has been much cloudiness as to what constitutes invention in our own minds; and it must be admitted that the dividing line is not immediately obvious between invention and the art of meeting difficulties with resourcefulness, or between invention and the act of solving any of the perplexing riddles of our daily lives.

It may be declared with confidence, however, that the difference between invention and any one of these other acts is that, while invention ends in performing such acts, it begins with an exercise of the imagination. A man who designs an engine to fulfil a stated purpose, who solves any problem whatever that is presented to him from outside, simply accomplishes a task that is given to him to accomplish; whereas, while the inventor accomplishes a similar task, he does it as a second step in a task that was not given him to accomplish, but that he himself had pictured to himself. The act of inventing consists of three separate acts—the act of conceiving, the act of developing, and the act of producing. Of these three acts, that of conceiving is obviously not only the first, but also the most important, distinctive and unusual.

For every real invention, there have been countless constructive acts. In the invention of the bow and arrow, the conception was probably instantaneous and unbidden. The subsequent work of developing the conception into material and practical shape was probably one of long duration, consisting of many acts, accompanied with many difficulties and disappointments, and accomplished finally in the face of much active and passive opposition.

The Old Stone Age gradually developed into the New Stone Age at different times in different localities, as successive improvements in implements were made. The New Stone Age was distinguished from its predecessor mainly by the fact that the principal weapons and utensils were formed into regular shapes, polished into smoothness, and in many cases ground to sharp points and keen cutting edges. These improvements made the implements more effective both as weapons and as utensils, by facilitating not only cutting but penetration.

How much invention was needed to make these improvements, it is not easy to decide; but probably only a little was required, and that of an order not very original or high; for the improvements were rather in detail than principle. Perhaps their character can be best indicated by saying that they were improvements, rather than inventions of a basic kind.

It may here be pointed out that the act of improving upon an invention already existing may be almost wholly a constructive act, performed on a visible and tangible material object, and not on a picture made by the imagination on the mind. In such a case, the act of improving belongs rather in the category of engineering than of invention, for the reason that it involves only a slight use of the imagination. It may also be pointed out, however, that a mere improvement may be, and sometimes has been an invention of the highest order. As a rule, of course, basic inventions have been the most brilliant and also the most important.

But it was not only by polished instruments of stone and bone that the New Stone Age was characterized; for we find in the records which our ancestors unintentionally left us, many evidences that they had invented the arts of making pottery, of spinning and weaving, and of constructing houses of a simple kind. This Age was characterized by many improvements besides those relating to articles of stone, and was a period far in advance of its predecessor on the march to civilization. It was marked by the domestication of animals and plants, the tilling of the soil, and a gradual change from a purely savage and nomadic mode of life. This change was first to a pastoral life, in which men lived in fixed habitations and tended their flocks; thence to an agricultural life, in which men cultivated the ground over large areas and grew crops of cereals and vegetables; and then to a still more settled existence, in which men congregated in villages and towns. Certainly, the race had taken the first steps, and had started on the path which it has since pursued.

In order to make the start and to proceed afterwards in the line begun, many physical, mental and spiritual attributes were needed and employed, that mere brutes did not possess, and because of which the civilization of the Old Stone Age had been begun and gradually developed. Of these faculties, those principally characteristic seem to have been mental; and among those faculties, invention, reason, construction and memory seem to have been the most important. It would be unreasonable to declare any one of those faculties to have been more important than the others; but it can hardly be denied that the first steps in the march of progress should be credited to invention. Clearly, it was the weapons and utensils of the Old Stone Age that made possible the subduing and subsequent domestication of certain animals, such as the horse, the cow, the dog, the sheep and the goat.

It may be pointed out, in passing, that many animals have not been domesticated even at this late day—such as the tiger, the eagle and the bear. But, equally, certain tribes of men have not been domesticated. It may be that in both the undomesticated men and the undomesticated brutes, the mind is of such a character that it cannot assimilate even the first grains of knowledge, or make any effort whatever of an inventive character.

There was one invention that was probably made in the Old Stone Age, which must have needed considerable inventiveness to be developed as highly as it was developed during the Old and New Stone Ages, and that was language. The origin of language is, of course, hidden in the impenetrable mystery of the childhood of the race; and it may be that language was an original attribute of man. If we reason, however, that the development of language must have been a continuing act from the first, inferring it from the fact that it has been a continuing act from the dawn of recorded history until now, and if we suppose that it had a rise and a growth like those of other arts, we may reasonably conclude that some man invented the plan of making his wants known by the use of vocal sounds, uttered in accordance with a preconcerted code; that the invention was only partially successful at first, and that it was afterwards improved. That language was not a natural gift, but rather the result of an invention and subsequent development, is suggested by the fact that a child has to be taught to speak, but does not have to be taught to exercise his natural functions, such as breathing, eating, drinking, walking, etc.

Which was the first invention ever made by man, there is, of course, no means of ascertaining; but it seems obvious that that of language must have been among the first. The invention of weapons we may easily imagine to have been actually the first, called for by the necessity of defense against wild beasts and other men. Following the defense by individual men of their individual lives, it seems logical to suppose that a man and his wife, a man and his brother, and then groups of men, banded together in their common defense against common foes. To further their joint action, what would be more valuable than a language consisting of vocal sounds, arranged in accordance with a simple code, as a means of conveying information, issuing warnings, and giving signals in emergencies, to insure concerted action?

That language should later be used for manifold other purposes would be most natural; for many other arts have been invented primarily to further man's first aim, the preservation of his life, and have afterwards been employed for other purposes. The uses of clothing, houses, knives, guns and of nearly all weapons are cases in point.

The New Stone Age seems to have passed gradually into the Age of Copper, because doubtless of a more or less accidental discovery when native copper was seen upon the ground, or when some copper ore was subjected to fire. The metal, by reason of its great durability, ductility, elasticity and strength, came to be used for many purposes—the first use being probably in weapons; for weapons were the main dependence of the people in their struggle against beasts.

A great advance was made when bronze was discovered, with which weapons and tools of many kinds could be made that were harder than those of copper. Then the Age of Bronze succeeded the Age of Copper. One can hardly imagine that bronze was really invented; for it is difficult to see how, knowing the softness of copper and tin, any primeval man could have imagined a metal made from them much harder than either, and then proceeded to make it by mixing about seven parts of copper with one part of tin. The gradual improvement made in bronze implements, and the different kinds of bronze that later appeared (made by altering the proportions of tin and copper) were doubtless due more to constructive and engineering methods than to pure invention; but nevertheless a considerable amount of inventing must have been required; for one can rarely effect any important improvement in any weapon, instrument or tool, without first imagining the improvement, and then endeavoring to effect it.

In fact, an overwhelming majority of the "inventions" for which patents are issued by our Patent Office, are for mere improvements over existing apparatus; and the bald fact that the thing accomplished is only such an improvement, instead of the creation of something different from everything else whatever, like the telephone or phonograph, does not debar the achievement from being classed as an invention. The pointed screw was merely an improvement over previous forms of screw, and yet it was an invention of high originality, novelty and importance. Obviously, improvements occupy various positions not only in importance and scope, but also in the relative degrees in which invention and construction were employed to bring them into being.

It is held by some that no purely human act can possibly create anything really new, that "there is nothing new under the sun," and that therefore every so-called invention made by a man must be merely a novel arrangement of already existing objects.

Of course, no man "creates" anything, in the sense that he makes anything whatever out of nothing; but it is a well-known fact that he has created many things in the sense that he has made many entities to exist that had not existed before as such entities; for instance, man made the speaking telephone to exist. The speaking telephone did not exist before Bell invented it, and it did exist after he invented it. To say that Bell did or did not create the telephone conveys a meaning dependent wholly on the meaning in which the word "create" is used. Men ordinarily use the word with such a meaning that it is correct to say that Bell created the speaking telephone; it being understood as a matter of common sense that Bell did not create the metals and other material parts which he put together to make the telephone.

Used in this sense, primeval man (or more correctly some primeval men, and probably a very few) created certain weapons, implements and utensils, that gave the men who used them such mastery over wild beasts and over men who did not use them, that the steps since taken toward civilization were made possible.

Our whole civilization can be traced back to those inventions, and can be shown to proceed from them and be based upon them. No other basis that civilization could have proceeded from can even be imagined; for the actual progress of events was the outcome of the actual nature of man, and the actual nature of his environment.

We seem forced to conclude, therefore, that we owe our civilization primarily to the invention of certain primeval implements and weapons, the art of making fire, etc., and therefore to the inventors who made the inventions. This does not mean that we do not owe it to other things besides inventions, and to other men besides inventors; for it is obvious that we owe it to all the facts of our history, and to such of our ancestors as did anything to advance it. We owe it in part, for instance, to the men who framed the laws that made living in villages and cities possible, to the men who executed the laws, and to all the men and women who observed the laws and gave examples of righteous living. For it is obvious that, no matter what inventions were made, the march of civilization could not have even started, unless there had been a sufficient number of good and intelligent men and women to keep the human procession in good order from the first.

It may be pointed out here that, although every human being has much of evil in his nature, yet even the most depraved person desires other people to be good. Even thieves see the advantage to themselves resulting from the fact that most men do not steal; murderers have no inclination toward being themselves murdered, and human beings as a class see the benefits of morality and good living throughout society as a whole. For this reason, and for the still more important reason that most individuals are not very different in their characteristics and abilities from the average of all individuals, the tendency of society is to reduce men to a common level; so that we see only a small fraction who are extremely good or extremely bad, extremely brilliant or extremely stupid, extremely large or extremely small, etc. Similarly, there is only a small fraction of the people who have done much good individually or much harm, or who have exercised individually any noticeable influence of any kind.

We may reasonably conclude, therefore, that there were only a few men in primeval days who performed any acts that entitle them to individual recognition; and as the only records that have come down to us indicate that the most important acts were the inventing of certain implements, we seem forced to conclude that most of the recognition accorded to individuals of primeval days may be limited to a very small number, and they inventors.

Who they were, and where and when they lived, is not known and probably never will be. For countless centuries their names and personalities have been forgotten as wholly as those of many beasts. But maybe other achievements like those that have exposed the history of certain Oriental kings and wise men to our knowledge, will some day tell us who were the inventors who started the march of human progress, and pointed out the road that it should follow.

Yet, if we infer the probable conditions of the remote past from the conditions of the present and recent past, we shall have to conclude that, while the names and deeds of prehistoric rulers may some day become known to us, and even the names of authors, poets and song singers, the names of the original inventors will be forever hid. For inventors have ever been depreciated in their day; even at the present time, despite the known facts as to what inventions and inventors have done for every one of us, the inventor as an inventor is lightly regarded, and so are his inventions. So are his inventions until they have ceased to be regarded as inventions, and have been accepted as constituent parts of the machine of civilization. By that time the inventor has often been forgotten.

The Age of Iron succeeded the Age of Bronze in the countries from which we have inherited our civilization; but in Africa bronze does not seem to have been discovered until after iron was. Iron being an element like copper, and not an alloy of two metals like bronze, it seems probable that its discovery, like that of copper, followed the act of heating stones with fire. The coming of iron seems due therefore to discovery rather than to invention; but yet the mere discovery that a very hard substance had been accidentally produced would of itself have brought forth no fruit. One is almost forced to infer from probability that the fact must have become known to many men, but only as a plain and uninteresting fact. Finally, some man realized that that hard substance was superior to bronze for making weapons, and then set to work to ascertain exactly what kinds of stone it could be gotten from, and exactly what process gave the best results.

To us who have been carefully taught the facts known at the present day, and whose minds have been trained by logic and mathematics to reason from effect to cause, and to construct frameworks of cause wherefrom to gain effects, it seems that anyone who noted that the hard substance which we call iron came from heating certain stones, would immediately invent a process for making iron in quantities. But prehistoric man had no knowledge whatever save that coming from his own observation and the oral teachings of the wise men; mathematics and logic did not exist; and the only training given him was in those simple arts of hunting, fishing, field tilling, etc., by which he earned his livelihood. For a mind so untrained and ignorant to leap from the simple noting of the accidental production of the metal to a realization of its value, then to a correct inference as to the possibility of producing it at will, then to a correct inference as to the method of producing it, and then to devising the method and actually producing iron at will, suggests a reasoning intelligence of an order exceedingly high.

Nevertheless, the art of making iron may have originated not so much from effort as from inspiration; the process may have been less one of reasoning than one of imagination, less one of construction than one of invention. In fact, when we realize that imagination is almost wholly a pure gift (like beauty, or artistic genius or a singing voice) while the reasoning and constructive faculties require long education, we may reasonably conclude that the production of iron and of all the metals and processes in prehistoric times, was probably attributable mainly to invention.

The crowning invention of prehistoric man was that of writing; for it lifted him out of his dependence on oral teachings, with their liability to error and forgetfulness, into a condition in which the facts and experiences of life, and the reasons for failure or success, could be put into permanent form, and supply sure bases from which to start on any line of progress in the future. The production of the art of writing seems to have been a pure invention, and it has always been so regarded. Nothing resembling writing is to be found in nature; nowhere do we see in nature any effort to preserve any records of any kind. How man, or a man, was led to invent writing we can only imagine, for we cannot ascertain. When we realize, however, how entirely novel an undertaking the production of writing was, and that there is no process of mere reasoning by which a man could arrive at a decision to produce it, we seem forced to conclude that it must have been caused by one of those inexplicable conceptions that imagination puts into the mind, and that constitute an inspiration, coming from the Great Outside and its ruler, the Almighty.

In fact, if one ponders the history and teachings of the Christian religion (in truth of all religions), and notes that the revelations on which they are believed to have been founded seem to have come unbidden to certain men as inspirations from On High, he must realize how similar are the conceptions that come to inventors in a field less spiritual, but yet actual. For in the case of each basic invention, an idea seems to have come unbidden to the mind, and grown and developed there.

The first writing was what we call picture writing, in which representations in outline of well-known objects were scratched with a hard point on some softer substance. This form of writing probably began in the Old Stone Age. It continued for different lengths of time among different peoples, as have all other characteristics of any stage of civilization; and it is practiced in some degree by some peoples even now. In fact, one might with reasonableness declare that many of the illustrations used in books and magazines and papers, many of the paintings and drawings that adorn our walls, and many of the moving pictures in our places of amusement convey messages by means of pictures, and are therefore forms of picture writing.

As the intelligence of man increased, and his consequent need for better means of expressing himself in writing increased, the idea occurred to someone to use conventional drawings to represent vocal sounds, instead of pictures of visible objects. The first writing of this kind, called phonetic writing, used characters that represented spoken words, and therefore required many characters and necessitated long and tedious study to master it. It was gradually replaced among most peoples by an improved phonetic system, in which each character represented a syllable instead of a word; though the Chinese have never wholly abandoned it. The syllabic system needed, of course, fewer characters, and was much more easily learned, much more flexible and generally satisfactory. The syllabic system was finally replaced among the more progressive peoples by the alphabetical system, in which each character represents a separate vocal sound. As the number of separate vocal sounds is few, only a few characters are needed. In most alphabets, the number of characters varies between twenty-two and thirty-six.

We of the present day plume ourselves greatly on our achievements in invention, and point to the tens of thousands of scientific appliances, books and works of art with which we have enriched our civilization. To most of us, prehistoric man was an uncouth creature, living in caves and uncleanly huts, and so far removed from us that in our hearts we class him as little higher than the beasts. Yet to prehistoric man we owe all that we are and all that we have. The gift of life itself came to us through him; and so did not only our physical faculties, but our mental, moral and spiritual faculties as well. It was prehistoric man who invented the appliances without which the wild beasts would not have been overcome, and the man, wilder than himself, been kept at bay; by means of which the soil was tilled, and boats were made to move upon the water, and villages and towns were built. It was prehistoric man who invented spoken language and the arts of drawing, painting, architecture, weaving and writing. It was prehistoric man who started the race on its forward march, and pointed it in the direction in which it has ever since advanced. It was prehistoric man who made the inventions on which all succeeding inventions have been based. The prehistoric inventor exercised an influence on progress greater than that of any other man.