FROM NATURAL PRODUCTS.
The earlier and the ruder tribes have always contented themselves with such food as the vegetable and animal world supplied them ready to their hands. The fruits of the forest and the denizens of the streams and woods sufficed for their wants. Wherever this condition prevails it is impossible for communities to be large in size or to have permanent abodes, for the favored spots where Nature is lavish enough with her gifts to support a large population at all periods of the year are too few, if indeed they anywhere exist, to be other than rare exceptions. Hence, no mere hunting tribe or race of fishermen has ever founded durable states or effected permanent and extended settlements. They are too unstable to allow of the concentration of power, and they are found split up into a number of small septs in a condition of constant war with each other, the usual grievance being the encroachment on each other's rights to the possession of food-localities.
Although the guiding principle of all the extensive and lasting migra tions of the human race is the food-supply, this is especially obvious where this supply is limited to the spontaneous products of nature. The earliest inhabitants of a district invariably confined themselves to that portion of it where their wants could be most easily supplied. When the population bad so increased that these wants were iu excess of the supply, a portion of the inhabitants moved elsewhere, seeking those spots where food could be obtained with the minimum of exertion. Only when the localities abounding in fruits, game, or fish were forcibly closed to them by stronger hands did they content themselves with the insufficient nourishment afforded by the desert and the tundra. Thus, the investiga tions of Nordenskjold have shown the Tchuktchis of the northern shores of Siberia to be a conglomerate of ethnic fragments driven into those inhospitable regions by the pressure of mightier nations, who dispossessed them of the more genial hunting-grounds to the south which they for merly controlled. Such is the history of all tribes dwelling in deserts and infertile tracts.
The long-received opinion that the race scattered from some centre over the earth's surface impelled by a desire of novelty or conquest, and in accordance with definite plans, is now out of date. The savage man has no ambition and no curiosity, and lays no plans beyond satisfying the immediate needs of his body.
Hunting has been estimated that in the temperate zone it requires on the average sixteen square miles to support one individual by natural products alone. Although any such calculation can only be a loose approximation, this will indicate that even in comparatively favored regions the struggle for subsistence is to the savage a severe one. Hence he was stimulated by the most urgent of needs to develop those arts which would facilitate him in obtaining his food—those relating to hunting and fishing. We may suppose that at first a club and a stone were his only hunting weapons, but he soon acquired more effective means of securing his prey. He learned to sharpen a stone and affix it to the end of a stick, thus forming a spear or javelin to throw, or with which to thrust. Nor was it long before he discovered that he could greatly increase the force of his dart by using a hurling-stick, as was seen among the natives of Central America and elsewhere, or by projecting it from a piece of wood bent by the sinew of an animal—the first bow and arrow. This import pant invention was made extremely early in the life of the race, in times long anterior to the beginning of history, and was so widely known that but few tribes have been discovered entirely ignorant of it. Until the discovery of gunpowder and firearms in modern times nothing was devised to surpass it as an effective aid either in assaults on wild beasts or in the conflicts of men.
By some tribes the primitive club was ingeniously bent into the boom a weapon capable of describing such a curve that it will return to the hands of a skilful thrower after it has hit its object. Instead of throw ing a stone from the hand, it was observed that much greater force could be obtained by projecting it from a strip of skin, and thus the sling came into use—a device independently originated in many nations in the Old and New Worlds. In different portions of the tropics, where the growth of long, straight hollow reeds offered the necessary material, as among the Malays of Melanesia, the tribes of the Upper Amazon, and those of Central America, the blow-tube or popgun was developed into a formidable weapon which could hurl its poisoned darts with deadly effect to man or beast.