The biggest things are not always the most important. A little article, used many times in the course of every day and familiar to every person, is one of the world's great inventions. It is the friction match. Fire is one of man's absolute necessities. Without it civilization would have been impossible, and life could scarcely continue. The story of man's power to produce and use fire is practically the story of civilization itself. So far as history can reveal there has never been in any time a people who were without the knowledge and use of fire; which, on its beneficent side, is man's indispensable friend; and in its wrath, a terrible destroyer. A mass of mythological stories has come down from the days of antiquity regarding the origin of fire. The Persian tradition is that fire was discovered by one of the hero dragon-fighters. He hurled a huge stone at a dragon, but missed his aim. The stone struck another rock. According to the story, "the heart of the rock flashed out in glory, and fire was seen for the first time in the world." The Dakota Indians of North America believed that their ancestors produced fire from the sparks which a friendly panther struck with its claws in scampering over a stony hill. Finnish poems describe how "fire, the child of the sun, came down from heaven, where it was rocked in a tube of yellow copper, in a large pail of gold." Some of the Australian tribes have a myth that fire came from the breaking of a staff held in the hands of an old man's daughter. In another Australian legend fire was stolen by a hawk and given to man; in still another a man held his spear to the sun and thus procured fire. According to Greek mythology, fire was stolen from heaven by Prometheus, friend of men, and brought to them in a hollow stalk of fennel. As the legend runs, he took away from mankind the evil gift of foreseeing the future, and gave them instead the better gifts of hope and fire. For the bestowing of these gifts upon the human race, Prometheus was sorely punished by Zeus, king of the gods. The myth that fire was stolen from heaven by a hero is not confined to the Greeks; it is scattered among the traditions of all nations. It is not strange that primitive man should ascribe the origin of fire to supernatural causes. Before he learned how to use and control it, he must have been strangely impressed with its various manifestations--the flash of the lightning, the hissing eruption of the volcano, the burning heat of the sun, and perhaps the wild devastation of forest and prairie fires caused by spontaneous combustion.