As the dog was the first animal domesticated, he was early used to help in transportation by harnessing him to a rude sled, or drag, by means of which he pulled articles from one place to another. The Eskimos have used dogs and the sled to a greater extent than any other race. The use of the camel, the llama, the horse, and the ass for packing became very common after their domestication. Huge packs were strapped upon the backs of these animals, and goods thus transported from one place to another. To such an extent was the camel used, even in the historic period, for transportation in the Orient that he has been called the "ship of the desert." The plains Indians had a method of attaching two poles, one at each side of an Indian pony, which extended backward, dragging on the ground. Upon these poles was built a little platform, on which goods were deposited and thus transported from one camp to another. It must have been a long time before water transportation performed any considerable economic service. It is thought by some that primitive man conceived the idea of the use of water for transportation through his experience of floating logs, or drifts, or his own process of swimming and floating. Jack London pictures two primitives playing on the logs near the shore of a stream. Subsequently the logs cast loose, and the primitives were floated away from the shore. They learned by putting their hands in the water and paddling that they could make the logs move in the direction which they wished to go. Perhaps this explanation is as good as any, inasmuch as the beginnings of modern transportation still dwell in the mist of the past. However, in support of the log theory is the fact that modern races use primitive boats made of long reeds tied together, forming a loglike structure. The _balsa_ of the Indians of the north coasts of South America is a very good representation of this kind of boat. Evidently, the first canoes were made by hollowing logs and sharpening the ends at bow and stern. This form of boat-making has been carried to a high degree of skill by the {104} Indians of the northwest coast of America and by the natives of the Hawaiian Islands. The birch-bark canoe, made for lighter work and overland transportation, is more suggestive of the light reed boat than of the log canoe. Also, the boats made of a framework covered with the skins of animals were prominent at certain periods of the development of races who lived on animal food. But later the development of boats with frames covered with strips of board and coated with pitch became the great vehicle of commerce through hundreds of years. It certainly is a long journey from the floating log to the modern floating passenger palace, freight leviathan, or armed dreadnought, but the journey was accomplished by thousands of steps, some short and some long, through thousands of years of progress.