no trains
and nothing like one of our good roads. The water has always had the
same advantage over the land; for as horses, trails, carts, roads, and
trains began to be used on land, so canoes, boats, sailing ships, and
steamers began to be used on water. Anybody can prove the truth of the
rule for himself by seeing how much easier it is to paddle a hundred
pounds ten miles in a canoe than to carry the same weight one mile over
a portage.

Presently the smarter men wanted something better than a little log
raft nosing its slow way along through dead shallow water when shoved
by a pole; so they put a third and longer log between the other two,
with its front end sticking out and turning up a little. Then, wanting
to cross waters too deep for a pole, they invented the first paddles;
and so made the same sort of catamaran that you can still see on the
Coromandel Coast in southern India. But savages who knew enough to
take catamarans through the pounding surf also knew enough to see that
a log with a hollow in the upper side of it could carry a great deal
more than a log that was solid; and, seeing this, they presently began
making hollows and shaping logs, till at last they had made a regular
dug-out canoe. When Christopher Columbus asked the West Indian savages
what they called their dug-outs they said _canoas_; so a boat dug out
of a solid log had the first right to the word we now use for a canoe
built up out of several different parts.

[Illustration: "DUG-OUT" CANOE]

Dug-outs were sometimes very big. They were the Dreadnought
battleships of their own time and place and people. When their ends
were sharpened into a sort of ram they could stave in an enemy's canoe
if they caught its side full tilt with their own end. Dug-out canoes
were common wherever the trees were big and strong enough, as in
Southern Asia, Central Africa, and on the Pacific Coast of America.
But men have always been trying to invent something better than what
their enemies have; and so they soon began putting different pieces
together to make either better canoes or lighter ones, or to make any
kind that would do as well as or better than the dug-out. Thus the
ancient Britons had coracles, which were simply very open basket-work
covered with skins. Their Celtic descendants still use canvas coracles
in parts of Wales and Ireland, just as the Eskimos still use
skin-covered kayaks and oomiaks. The oomiak is for a family with all
their