In time, he dug out ore from mines, and learnt the use
first of gold, next of silver, then of copper, tin, bronze, and iron.
Side by side with these long secular changes, he evolved the family,
communal or patriarchal, polygamic or monogamous. He built the hut, the
house, and the palace. He clothed or adorned himself first in skins and
leaves and feathers; next in woven wool and fibre; last of all in purple
and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. He gathered into
hordes, tribes, and nations; he chose himself a king, gave himself laws,
and built up great empires in Egypt, Assyria, China, and Peru. He raised
him altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks. His picture-writing grew into
hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps,
into alphabetic symbols, the raw material of the art of printing. His
dug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the 'Great Eastern'; his
boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin and
his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in the
telephone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolution
has really been most marvellous, its steps have been all more distinctly
historical; so that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian,
French, and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth of
the trireme, the 'Great Harry,' the 'Victory,' and the 'Minotaur' from
the coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity.
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