It is not difficult to see how wood, in the forms which it possesses by nature, came to be fashioned into clubs, axes, and digging-sticks, and how bones, horns, shells, and the like were converted into tools and objects of adornment. But how did primitive man acquire _bow and arrow_? The general belief seems to be that this weapon was invented by some resourceful mind of an early age. But an inventor, in the proper sense of the word, must know in advance what he wishes to invent. The man, therefore, who constructed the bow and arrow for the first time must already have had some previous idea of it. To effect a combination of existing implements, or to improve them in useful ways, is a comparatively easy matter. But no one can manufacture implements if he possesses nothing over and above material that is in itself somehow suitable for the purpose. The most primitive implements, therefore, such as the digging-stick, the club, and the hammer, are all products of nature, at most changed slightly by man as their use requires. But this is obviously not true of bow and arrow. We may, perhaps, find a suggestion for the solution of our problem in a hunting weapon which, though belonging, of course, to the later totemic culture, is in principle simpler than the bow and arrow--the boomerang of the Australians. The word is probably familiar to all, but the nature of the weapon is not so well known, especially its peculiarly characteristic form by virtue of which, if it fails to strike its object, it flies back to the one who hurled it. The boomerang, which possesses this useful characteristic, is, in the first place, a bent wooden missile, pointed at both ends. That this curved form has a greater range and strikes truer to aim than a straight spear, the Australian, of course, first learned from experience. The boomerang, however, will not return if it is very symmetrically constructed; on the contrary, it then falls to the ground, where it remains. Now it appears that the two halves of this missile are asymmetrical. One of the halves is twisted spirally, so that the weapon, if thrown forward obliquely, will, in accordance with the laws of ballistics, describe a curve that returns upon itself. This asymmetry, likewise, was discovered accidentally. In this case, the discovery was all the more likely, for primitive weapons were never fashioned with exactitude. That this asymmetry serves a useful purpose, therefore, was first revealed by experience. As a result, however, primitive man began to copy as faithfully as possible those implements which most perfectly exhibited this characteristic. Thus, this missile is not a weapon that required exceptional inventive ability, though, of course, it demanded certain powers of observation. The characteristics, accordingly, that insured the survival of the boomerang were discovered accidentally and then fixed through an attentive regard to those qualities that had once been found advantageous.