But I have only told you part of the story. The cave would have been cold and damp and dark, with only the bare ground or a pile of leaves for a bed. There would probably have been bats and big spiders sharing the cave with you. You might have had on the skin of some animal your father had killed but as this only covered part of your body and as there was no fire, you would have felt cold in winter, and when it got very cold you might have frozen to death. For breakfast you might have had some dried berries or grass-seed or a piece of raw meat, for dinner the same thing, for supper still the same thing. You would never have had any bread or milk or griddle-cakes with syrup, or oatmeal with sugar on it, or apple pie or ice-cream. There was nothing to do all day long but watch out for wild animals--bears and tigers; for there was no door with lock and key, and a tiger, if he found you out, could go wherever you went and “get you” even in your cave. And then some day your father, who had left the cave in the morning to go hunting, would not return, and you would know he had been torn to pieces by some wild beast, and you would wonder how long before your turn would come next. Do you think you would like to have lived then? 3 Fire! Fire!! Fire!!! The first things are usually the most interesting--the first baby, the first tooth, the first step, the first word, the first spanking. This book will be chiefly the story of first things; those that came second or third or fourth or fifth you can read about and study later. Primitive People did not at first know what fire was. They had no matches nor any way of making a light or a fire. They had no light at night. They had no fire to warm themselves by. They had no fire with which to cook their food. Somewhere and sometime, we do not know exactly when or how, they found out how to make and use fire. If you rub your hands together rapidly, they become warm. Try it. If you rub them together still more rapidly, they become hot. If you rub two sticks together rapidly, they become warm. If you rub two sticks together very, very, very rapidly, they become hot and at last, if you keep it up long enough and fast enough, are set on fire. The Indians and boy scouts do this and make a fire by twisting one stick against another. This was one of the first inventions, and this invention was as remarkable for them at that time as the invention of electric light in our own times. People of the Stone Age had hair and beards that were never cut, because they had nothing to cut them with, even had they wanted them short, which they probably didn’t. Their finger-nails grew like claws until they broke off. They had no clothes made of cloth, for they had no cloth and nothing with which to cut and sew cloth if they had. They had no saws to cut boards, no hammer or nails to fasten them together to make houses or furniture.