. That it is the history thereof, is
surely patent to anyone who will imagine to himself what must have been.
In the first place, the strongest and cunningest savage must have had the
chance of producing children more strong and cunning than the average; he
would have--the strongest savage has still--the power of obtaining a
wife, or wives, superior in beauty and in household skill, which involves
superiority of intellect; and therefore his children would--some of them
at least--be superior to the average, both from the father's and the
mother's capacities. They again would marry select wives; and their
children again would do the same; till, in a very few generations, a
family would have established itself, considerably superior to the rest
of the tribe in body and mind, and become assuredly its ruling race.

Again, if one of that race invented a new weapon, a new mode of tillage,
or aught else which gave him power, that would add to the superiority of
his whole family. For the invention would be jealously kept among them
as a mystery, a hereditary secret. To this simple cause, surely, is to
be referred the system of hereditary caste occupations, whether in Egypt
or Hindoostan. To this, too, the fact that alike in Greek and in
Teutonic legend the chief so often appears, not merely as the best
warrior and best minstrel, but as the best smith, armourer, and
handicraftsman of his tribe. If, however, the inventor happened to be a
low-born genius, its advantages would still accrue to the ruling race.
For nothing could be more natural or more easy--as more than one legend
intimates--than that the king should extort the new secret from his
subject, and then put him to death to prevent any further publicity.

Two great inventive geniuses we may see dimly through the abysses of the
past, both of whom must have become in their time great chiefs, founders
of mighty aristocracies--it may be, worshipped after their death as gods.

The first, who seems to have existed after the age in which the black
race colonised Australia, must have been surely a man worthy to hold rank
with our Brindleys, Watts, and Stephensons. For he invented (and mind,
one man must have invented the thing first, and by the very nature of it,
invented it all at once) an instrument so singular, unexpected, unlike
anything to be seen in nature, that I wonder it has not been called, like
the plough, the olive, or the vine, a gift of the immortal gods: and