The Human Adventure - Page 2

perceived a disposition in this creature no beast had shown
before, a disposition to make itself independent of the conditions of
climate and the chances of the seasons. Did shelter fail among the trees
and rocks, this curious new thing-began to make itself harbours of its
own; was food irregular, it multiplied food. It began to spread out from
its original circumstances, fitting itself to novel needs, leaving the
forests, invading the plains, following the watercourses upward and
downward, presently carrying the smoke of its fires like a banner of
conquest into wintry desolations and the high places of the earth.

The first onset of man must have been comparatively slow, the first
advances needed long ages. By small degrees it gathered pace. The stride
from the scattered savagery of the earlier stone period to the first
cities, historically a vast interval, would have seemed to that still
watcher, measuring by the standards of astronomy and the rise and
decline of races and genera and orders, a, step almost abrupt. It took,
perhaps, a thousand generations or so to make it. In that interval man
passed from an animal-like obedience to the climate and the weather and
his own instincts, from living in small family parties of a score or so
over restricted areas of indulgent country, to permanent settlements, to
the life of tribal and national communities and the beginnings of
cities. He had spread in that fragment of time over great areas of the
earth's surface, and now he was adapting himself to the Arctic circle on
the one hand and to the life of the tropics on the other; he had
invented the plough and the ship, and subjugated most of the domestic
animals; he was beginning to think of the origin of the world and the
mysteries of being. Writing had added its enduring records to oral
tradition, and he was already making roads. Another five or six hundred
generations at most bring him to ourselves. We sweep into the field of
that looker-on, the momentary incarnations of this sempiternal being,
Man. And after us there comes--

A curtain falls.

The time in which we, whose minds meet here in this writing, were born
and live and die, would be to that imagined observer a mere instant's
phase in the swarming liberation of our kind from ancient imperatives.
It would seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift change and expansion
and achievement. In this last handful of years, electricity has ceased
to be a curious toy, and now carries half mankind upon their daily
journeys, it lights our cities till they outshine the moon and stars,
and reduces to our service a score of hitherto unsuspected metals; we
clamber to the pole of our globe, scale every mountain, soar into the
air, learn how to overcome the malaria