r history is made up of two elements: things that
happen, and writers who record them. So when we speak of "historic
times," we mean the times since writing came into general use. All that
went before we class as "prehistoric" times, _i.e._, times of which we
can have no history. It is clear, then, that if, of two countries, one
knows writing and uses it to register what happens to it, while the
other does not, the former will be living in historic, the latter in
prehistoric times.

More than that: there are plenty of peoples now living in--for
them--prehistoric times. Take all the savage tribes still scattered over
land and sea in many parts of the world. Just as there are enough South
Sea Islanders for whom the Age of Stone is not over yet, since they
still use flint, bone, and fishbone for their tools and weapons, and
what metal they have comes to them through barter from Europeans or
Americans. Captain Cook--or some other noted voyager and
discoverer--received as a present from a South Sea chieftain a flint
axe, beautifully shaped and polished like a mirror. The chief told his
white friend it had taken _fifty years_ to produce that polish, his
grandfather, his father, and himself having worked on it at odd moments
of leisure!

And yet, when we speak of "historic" and "prehistoric" times, we never
think of all these races; they do not count among the so-called
"culture-races," because they have produced no civilization of their
own, have done nothing to advance the work of the world, added nothing
to its treasury; in short, they have not helped to make history.

Just one word more about these prehistoric ages and the memorials they
have left of themselves. No matter how various the stages of human
culture which these latter betray, one feature is common to all, back to
the most primitive feasting-places of the cave-dwellers; it is--the
knowledge and use of fire. Yet there most certainly was a time when men
had not yet learned to produce and to handle this marvellous force of
nature, their most helpful friend and most destructive foe. Can we
picture to ourselves _how_ miserable and degraded, _how_ distressingly
like that of other forest animals must have then been the condition of
those who yet were the fathers of the coming human race? Hardly. Our
imagination itself stands still, helpless and puzzled, before a state of
things so remote, so utterly beyond our power to realize and compare.

INVENTION AND DISC