Among these perhaps the most important and the most conspicuous is Rowing, which as a serious business has played no inconsiderable part in great events of human history, and as a pastime is inferior to none of the class to which it belongs. Its votaries will not hesitate to claim for it even the chief place, by reason of the pleasure and emulation to which it so readily ministers, as a healthful exercise, and as a means of competitive effort requiring both skill and endurance. But the oar, before it ministered to recreation, had a long history of labour in the service of man, which is not yet ended, and itself was not shaped but by evolution from earlier types, of which the paddle and ultimately the human hand and arm are the original beginnings. Will it be wearisome to speculate on these beginnings, and to try to cast back in thought and research for the first origins of the noble pastime which forms the subject of the present volume? Fortunately, in savage life still extant on the habitable globe we have the survival of many, if not of all, the earliest types of locomotion. Man in his natural condition has to follow nature, and by following to subdue her in his struggle for existence. Climate and race differentiate his action in this respect, and results, under parallel circumstances, similar, though different in detail, attend his efforts in different parts of the world. A land animal, he is from the first brought face to face with water, deep water of lakes, and of rivers, and of the sea, and in all these he finds bounds to his desires, as well as things to be desired; opposite shores to which he wishes to cross, fish and vegetable growth which he wants for food. Horace tells us that 'oak and triple brass he had around his breast who first to the fierce sea committed his frail raft,' but the first man who committed _himself_ to deep water, and essayed the oarage of his arms and legs, must have been free from such incumbrances, and yet have had a stout heart within him. And simultaneously with, or even prior to such adventure, must have been others of a similar character aided by a piece of wood, or a bundle of rushes, or an inflated skin, the elementary boat, the very embryo of navigation. Such beginnings are still in evidence on the western coast of Australia, where savages may be seen sitting astride on a piece of light wood and so venturing forth upon the waters of the sea. Homer, who in the Odyssey delights in making the man of many counsels and many devices, with all his wealth of what was then modern experience, find himself reduced to the shifts and expedients of a man thrown, like the savage, upon his own solitary resources, pictures to us Ulysses seated astride upon the mast of his shipwrecked vessel and paddling with both hands, thus reverting in his distress, as no doubt others have done since, to the very earliest method of navigation, now only practised for choice by savages,