204 KINEMATICS OF MACHINERY.
centuries into our complex civilisation, through high cultures and between declining ones, until at last in the western lands during the last two hundred years they have received the impulse which still urges them in their upward flight. It is, therefore, partly from Archaeology, partly from Philology, partly from Ethnology and Anthropology, that we must obtain materials for the investigation of our subject.
In addition to material found existing in fact or in tradition, we may assist our research by the examination of those delicate indications of the course of the development of men's capacities which are revealed in their language, by means of which notable results have been obtained in the so-called linguistic or glottistic Archaeo- logy. We are, indeed, indebted to a philologist for a remarkable at- tempt to trace out the earliest appearance of the machine. Geiger, whose death has been so great a loss to students of the history of language, has laid down certain base-lines in two published chapters on the Origin of Tools and the Production of Fire,* which the mechanician, who wishes to trace his subject through prehistoric and historic times' up to to-day, cannot leave unnoticed. Geiger, in his excellent little work, comes to the conclusion, after very thoroughly considering the matter from all sides, that rotary motion was the first that men produced by any arrangement which could be called machinal. The pieces of wood rubbed together for the production of fire, which as " double wood " play no unimportant part in the religious ceremonies of the ancient Indo-germanic peoples, and are still so much used by uncivilised races, form according to him one of the first, if not the very first, arrangement deserving the name of machine.-f- This was at a time so early that fire was apparently not yet used in houses, but appeared only in religious observances. For important reasons seem to point more and more distinctly to the conclusion that the human race has passed through a fireless time, a time when it had not yet learned to employ the " friendly element " in its dwellings, although it reverenced or worshipped it in sacred places.
A piece of wood, roughly pointed at one end, is placed perpendicularly upon another in which a small hole or recess has been made, and is caused to twirl rapidly backwards and forwards by
- Geiger, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menscheit. Stuttgart, 1871.
t Klemm also mentions this in passing. Kultur- Wissenschaft ; III. 392.
