Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/22

V 2 General History of Europe or "discover." Man has happened on and found out accidentally very many things that he has slowly learned through the ages. 2. Man Learns by Imitation. One of the great differences be- tween man and other animals is that what one man invents may be imitated by others and become a tradition of the tribe. An old animal let us say an elephant or horse has learned some- thing by experience and is wiser than a young one, but he cannot teach what he knows to the baby elephant or colt. Men and women, however, can teach boys and girls what they have learned. In this way discoveries which have been made from time to time have been passed down from generation to generation and have become more and more numerous, until the descendants of men who could not make a fire or speak a sentence or build a canoe have finally, in modern times, been able to construct an electric furnace hotter than the sun itself, dispatch messages around the world, and send great steamships back and forth across the sea. Each new invention usually depends on earlier inventions and these on still earlier ones, until, if we could follow the history of civilization back to the very beginning, we might find the man under the tree making the first spear hundreds of thousands of years ago. 3. Civilization the Story of Invention. The history of civili- zation is the story of how man invented and discovered all those things which we now have and of which at the start he was igno- rant. We nowadays think of invention as going on rapidly, so that even a boy or girl can observe that new things are being discovered as he looks around or reads the newspapers and magazines. But in the beginning invention went on very, very slowly, and mankind has spent almost its whole existence in a state of savagery far below that of the most ignorant peoples to be found today in central Africa or the arctic regions. 4. Man's Long History and Slow Progress. If we imagine that man began to make the simplest inventions five hundred thousand years ago, and we let this five hundred thousand years be represented by a line fifty feet long, each foot would correspond to ten thousand years. Forty-nine feet would represent the period