He was a fisherman tens of thousands of years before he tilled the soil.

My dog begins acting strangely. He does not always come at my whistle. When I stroke his head, he glares at me in a wild way. The hair on his back, from his neck to the root of his tail, stands out like a stiff brush.

My dog comes and goes in a mysterious way; and a terrible fear creeps into my heart.

One night, I waited a long time for him, but he did not return. Had he returned to the wolf-pack?

I stood alone in the unbroken wilderness. I waited for three days and nights, in dismal terror, but he never came back.

My old faithful friend, long the nightly companion of my camp fire, the dog that had helped me hunt, and replied to my whistle, and stood ready to defend me with his very life, on this day I say, when the very sun died in the sky (that is, the secret of fire being lost), the dog finding the ashes cold and no camp fire after nightfall, went back to the old wild pack in the jungle; and that was the saddest day of all, for now this historic beast that we call Man stands utterly alone, on one side the destructive forces of Nature, on the other the ferocity of wild beasts.

Surveying this tremendous panorama with all its black brooding shadows, overarching into the midnight of time and eternity, I behold before me the primeval brute-man, the elemental Unrisen Savage. Against him, now I match the inventive genius of Edison, with his phonograph; Marconi, with his wireless; Copernicus, with his theory of the solar system; Bacon, with his empirical inventive idea; Bell, with his telephone; Howe, with his sewing machine; McCormick, with his reaper; and all other masters of inventive triumphs.

Before us stands the greatest inventive genius of all time, this brute-man; the man with the one fundamental invention in the story of life, legendary or recorded.

The beast-man used his invention to protect his own life and to supply himself food.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature; and selfpreservation, in this midnight of life, means food against starvation.

Hunger and self-preservation are thus but twin names. for one and the same fact.

That is to say, it is the "survival of the fittest."

And the

And in the world before us, "the survival of the fittest" is the beast that kills the other beast. invention before us made man king.

No other invention did so much to change habits, yet the bow and arrow was invented when there was absolutely nothing in the world to go by-no lathe, no theory of forces, no stored up knowledge.

Yet in the face of this gigantic void, mind triumphed over matter, the brain against the beast.

With the bow the brute-man brought into play an extraordinary combination of contradictory forces, all working for self-preservation. It is marvelous, to think that he could work it out. Beside it, all modern inventions are child's play.

The brute-man drew to his ear, or to his heart; the flexible rush-string replied in exactly the opposite direction to the curve of the bow; the arrow was fixed between the two inflexions at a point in the direct path of the right line, the fingers let go, bow, rush-string, and arrow replied to eye, brain and muscles-and killed the enemy.

What a stupendous invention to come out of the midnight of time!

For thousands of years, nay, for tens of thousands, thereafter, the bow continued to be man's supreme tool for the propulsion of missiles in the chase or in war.

Great battles were won by archery-Agincourt, Crecy, Poitiers-what wonders the ash, the cornel tree, the horn of the goat, the wood of the orange and the palm performed.

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It is a fact that as late as the year 1814, at the siege. of Paris, Bashkirs in the Russian army carried chainmail bow cases and quivers.

We have had nothing since the very dawn of applied intelligence on this earth, as significant as the bow and

arrow.

Modern silk weaving, exquisite pottery, printing presses, the law of gravitation, the molecular theory of gases, the theory of star-dust, the understanding of the true nature of comets, the profound scholarship that uncovered the Glacial Period, the mind that charted, on paper, the inter-relation of all forms of life, as set forth in the theory of evolution-all these conceptions of the human mind, applied to invention and discovery, as the proportion may be, significant as they are, wonderful as they are, are but child's play before the prodigious idea issuing from the mind of an Unrisen Savage, 200,000 years ago, in the "Stone-Dawn" of time-the bow and arrow, which satisfied the first law of nature-hunger and self-preservation.

My dog just before he disappeared, had led me face to face with the primeval savage who conceived this idea. It came about like this: I saw a savage walking along the beach, in his hand a supple stick.

He flipped a pebble, quite by accident. It flew with great force, hitting another beast-man on the forehead. The man that was struck fell dead in his tracks.

The thing was done in a twinkling, and the man with the stick drew back in surprise.

From my hiding place, I could see him looking over the stick as if it were a magic stick. He spent an hour or more gazing at it from one end to the other. He was deeply engrossed in thought, and it was clear that his mind was clouded.

It all came to him suddenly, like an inspiration.
He had the great clue.

I saw his brute-face alight with the glow of reason, and I saw him reach for a branch on the river shore, and bend the stick into a rude bow.

As by a miracle, he grasped the idea of coordinating the opposed individual forces of his arm, his eye, his muscles; the reed bending one way, and a rush-string in an opposed direction.

In the very nature of social evolution, certain fundamental inventions and discoveries can be made but once.

The profound triumphs of Bacon along the empirical idea of invention, magnificent as they are, have in no sense been as important in transforming human habits as has been the one inspirational idea that came to us when a nameless brute-man, away back there in the human swarm, emerged from the plutonian shadows long enough to give to our race its first and greatest chance for self-preservation.

I looked around for my dog. I heard him howling with the wolf pack in the jungle. I was now alone face to face with wild nature, had reached the void in time when man had not even yet made friends with the wolf dog.

Of a sudden hope returned. I broke a supple cane from the wild tangle beside me, threaded it with a reed, shaped a few arrows, which I pointed with a rough stone, by grinding, and decided then and there to take my chance of life and death, along with the brute-men howling in the wilderness.

The bow and arrow was my only friend, against all the cannibalistic brutes, as well as against imminent starvation.

It all came to me, unexpectedly. I was myself, and still I seemed another man, too.

I whistled again, and waited for the dog. To my surprise, I found that I myself was the Unrisen Savage.

At that moment, I felt something pushing my arm. I looked down and rubbed my eyes.

I had fallen asleep before the fire, and my faithful dog was licking my hand.

"Well, old fellow, we have been on an exceedingly long journey, and I know you were positively there at

the beginning and we both realize now what was the greatest invention in the history of mankind. Otherwise, we would not be here to tell the tale. I was the Unrisen Savage, you were my first faithful friend.”

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'Master," he plainly replied, "a dog is always your friend. Is it not true?"

And I stroked his silky brindle coat and was obliged to concede that my faithful dog had spoken the truthand in addition had taught me some wonderful things. Of a sudden a strange idea came over me. The bruteman falling on his face before the lightning's flash, the brute-man alone in the jungle, beating back with stone maul or bow and arrow the snarling wolf pack, the bruteman alone in the face of Nature back in the Stone-Dawn -is none other than your own old-self; for in you still abide the ancient fear of ghosts and hunger.