There is one point that is of great interest in this connection,
although I can only hint at it. Among the things that happened in that
dim past when man was coming into existence was the increase of his
powers of manipulation; and that was a factor of immense importance.
Anaxagoras, it is said, wrote a treatise in which he maintained that the
human race would never have become human if it had not been for the
hand. I do not know that there was so very much exaggeration about that.
It was certainly of great significance that the particular race of
mammals whose intelligence increased far enough to make it worth while
for natural selection to work upon intelligence alone was the race which
had developed hands and could manipulate things. It was a wonderful era
in the history of creation when that creature could take a club and use
it for a hammer, or could pry up a stone with a stake, thus adding one
more lever to the levers that made up his arm. From that day to this,
the career of man has been that of a person who has operated upon his
environment in a different way from any animal before him. An era of
similar importance came probably somewhat later, when man learned how to
build a fire and cook his food. Here was another means of acting upon
the environment. Here was the beginning of the working of endless
physical and chemical changes through the application of heat, just as
the first use of the club or the crowbar was the beginning of an
enormous development in the mechanical arts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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