d directly. It brings into play the
associative memory, and involves the recognition of analogies. There
is a certain likeness between the flying back of a bough in one's face
and the rebound of a bow, between a serpent's tooth and a poisoned
arrow, between floating timber and a raft or boat; and water, steam,
and electricity are like a horse in one respect--they will all make
wheels go around, and do work.

Now, the savage had this faculty of seeing analogies and doing things
in indirect ways. With the club, knife, and sword he struck more
effectively than with the fist; with hooks, traps, nets, and pitfalls
he understood how to seize game more surely than with the hands; in
the bow and arrow, spear, blow-gun, and spring-trap he devised motion
swifter than that of his own body; he protected himself with armor
imitated from the hides and scales of animals, and turned their
venom back on themselves. That the savage should have originated the
inventive process and carried it on systematically is, indeed, more
wonderful than that his civilized successors should continue the
process; for every beginning is difficult.

When occupations become specialized and one set of men has continually
to do with one and only one set of machinery and forces, the constant
play of attention over the limited field naturally results in
improvements and the introduction of new principles. Modern inventions
are magnificent and seem quite to overshadow the simpler devices
of primitive times; but when we consider the precedents, copies,
resources, and accumulated knowledge with which the modern
investigator works, and, on the other hand, the resourcelessness of
primitive man in materials, ideas, and in the inventive habit itself,
I confess that the bow and arrow seems to me the most wonderful
invention in the world.

Viewing the question from a different angle, we find another argument
for the homogeneous character of the human mind in the fact that the
patterns of interest of the civilized show no variation from those of
the savage. Not only the appetites and vanities remain essentially the
same, but, on the side of intellectual interest, the type of mental
reaction fixed in the savage by the food-quest has come down unaltered
to the man of science as well as to the man of the street. In
circumventing enemies and capturing game, both the attention and the
organic processes worked together in primitive man under great stress
and strain. Whene