The Conquest of Nature Author:Henry Smith Williams Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: revolutionary in its effects upon society, as these later inventions which we have just named. To attempt to define them clearly is to enter the field of uncerta... more »inty, but two or three conjectures may be hazarded that cannot be very wide of the truth. It is clear, for example, that if we go back in imagination to the very remotest ancestors of man that can be called human, we must suppose a vast and revolutionary stage of progress to have been ushered in by the first race of men that learned to make habitual use of the simplest implement, such as a mere club. When man had learned to wield a club and to throw a stone, and to use a stone held in the hand to break the shell of a nut, he had attained a stage of culture which augured great things for the future. Out of the idea of wielded club and hurled stone were to grow in time the ideas of hammer and axe and spear and arrow. Then there came a time—no one dare guess how many thousands of years later—when man learned to cover his body with the skin of an animal, and thus to become in a measure freed from the thraldom of the weather. He completed his enfranchisement by learning to avail himself of the heat provided by an artificial fire. Equipped with these two marvelous inventions he was able to extend the hitherto narrow bounds of his dwelling-place, passing northward to the regions which at an earlier stage of his development he dared not penetrate. Under stress of more exhilarating climatic conditions, he developed new ideals and learned to overcome new difficulties; developing both a material civilization and the advanced mentalitythat is its counterpart, as he doubtless never would have done had he remained subject to the more pampering conditions of the tropics. The most important, perhaps, of the new things which he wa...« less