Who first applied fire to the metal, and thus made it plastic as the clay and sharper than the stone? who first discovered fire itself? No one knows; nor is the question worth asking. But there is one thing well worth noticing: it is the answer given to the question, and that in the rudest of times and amongst many various nations. Some god bestowed it. This tendency to look for a supernatural giver is very soon and very widely developed. And what is more, the idea of a giver has called forth amongst rude selfish people struggling for existence, the desire to manifest their gratitude by some act of worship which should also be some act of self-denial. On a certain day of the year all lights shall be extinguished, and one man amongst them (endowed for the very purpose with imaginary sanctity) shall rekindle the flame, thus acknowledging by this symbol its reception from the divine Giver. The ancient Peruvians drew their fire on this solemn occasion at once from the sun; they collected its rays into a focus by a concave mirror of polished metal, and thus ignited some dried cotton, or bark, or fungus. Nothing could be more expressive and appropriate than such a symbolic act. It is a pity that the historian has to record that other symbolic acts (if such they are to be considered) were of a cruel and hideous description. The savage is not accustomed only to _thank_ God; he has, he thinks, to propitiate His favour; and as he has nothing to _give_, he _destroys_ in honour of the universal Bestower. The worship of the American Indian is tainted more than any other we read of with the rite of human sacrifice. Various methods for obtaining fire have been invented, but the earliest seems to have been by the friction of two dry pieces of wood. It was a progressive step, we presume, when the bark of a certain tree or a dried fungus was used for tinder. However produced, it was to the savage, in the first instance, itself a tool, the immediate instrument he employed to cut down the tree which would have resisted a long while his flint hatchet. We thought that all known people had made discovery of fire and converted it to their own purposes; but the inhabitants of the Ladrones, when discovered by the Spaniards, are said to have shrunk from fire as from a thing they simply feared: “they called it a devil, a god that bit fiercely when it was touched, and lived on wood, which they saw it devour.”