It is a characteristic of evolution, as has been pointed out by wise men, that complexity eventually evolves from simplicity. In no one department of man's endeavor does this truth stand out more clearly than in the evolution of weapons. For the oldest weapon that we know of was probably a stone, or a stick used as a club; and each succeeding weapon has been more complicated than its predecessor,--needing additional parts with which to secure the additional results achieved. This increased complexity has entailed increased liability to derangement, because the failure of any one part has entailed the failure or the decreased effectiveness of the weapon as a whole. This increased liability to derangement has entailed a demand for not only increased care and skill in fabricating the weapon, but for increased knowledge, diligence and skill in caring for it, and using it. The superiority of the gun over all previously existing weapons was quickly recognized, and every civilized nation soon adopted it as its major implement of war. As the gun was a piece of mechanism, it possessed the attribute which seems to give to pieces of mechanism an element of superiority over every other thing in the universe, the attribute of continual improvability. Human beings do not possess this attribute, nor does any other thing in nature, so far as we know. Every human being begins where his father did--and so does everything else on the earth; though human invention has recently made it possible for certain plants to be improved. No new invention ever dies as a man does, even if the material parts or immaterial parts that compose it are destroyed. On the contrary, it lives, in the sense that it exists as a definite usable entity, and also in the sense that it continues to propagate. And the things that it propagates do not begin as helpless and useless babies, but as mature creations. The first completed gun is still the model for the guns that men make now, and will continue to be the model for all guns in the future. The man who made the first gun has been succeeded by other men, as the first gun has been succeeded by other guns; but the human successors have been no improvement on the inventor of the first gun, while the guns that have succeeded the first gun have been improvements on it to a degree that it is difficult--in fact, impossible, to realize. The relations of the gun to civilization are reciprocal, and are therefore in accord with most of the other phenomena of our lives; for just as the gun furthered the improvement of civilization, civilization furthered the improvement of the gun. Nearly every step taken in the physical sciences, and afterward in engineering and general mechanics, has had a direct effect in improving the gun. The gun began as an exceedingly rough, awkward and crude appliance; the gun today is one of the most highly specialized and perfect appliances that the world possesses.