by the lightning. However this may be, he had in the earhest times learned to produce the vital spark by means of friction. The fire borer, according to Tylor, is among the oldest of human inventions.
Only gradually did primeval man learn the various properties of fire and discover the different uses to which it might be put, just as historic man has learned only gradually the possible uses of electricity. By some happy accident or discovery he learned that it would harden clay, and he became a potter; that it would smelt ores, and he became a worker in metals; and that it would aid him in a hundred other ways. "Fire," says Joly, "presided at the birth of nearly every art, or quickened its progress." The
Fig. 5.—Primitive Methods of making Fire
(After Ranke-Tylor)
place it holds in the development of the family, of religion, and of the industrial arts is revealed by these three significant words—"the hearth, the altar, the forge." No other agent has contributed more to the progress of civilization. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive how without fire primitive man could ever have emerged from the Age of Stone.
9. The Domestication of Animals.—"When we visit a farm at the present day and observe the friendly nature of the life which goes on there,—the horse proudly and obediently bending his neck to his yoke; the cow offering her streaming udder to the milkmaid; the woolly flock going forth to the field, accompanied by their trusty protector, the dog, who comes fawning to his master,—this familiar intercourse between man and beast seems so natural that it is scarcely conceivable that things may once have been different.
