No incident attending the discovery of America is more suggestive than the evidence which first satisfied Columbus that his exploration of the mysterious western ocean had not been in vain. The sun had descended beneath the waves as his eye ranged along the horizon in search of the long expected land, when suddenly a light glimmered in the distance, once and again reappeared to the eyes of Pedro Gutierrez and others whom he summoned to confirm his vision, and then darkness and doubt resumed their reign. But to Columbus all was clear. Not only did those flitting gleams reveal to him certain signs of the long-wished-for land; they told him no less clearly that the land was inhabited by man. There is something singularly significant in the old Greek myth which represents the Titanic son of Iapetus stealing the fire of Zeus that he might confer on the human race a power over the crude elements of nature. Man is peculiarly fire-using. The element which becomes in his hands a power that controls all the others, and subjects them to his use, is an object of dread to the lower animals, alike amid arctic snows and the shadows of a night-camp in the tropics. Its use, moreover, is so universal as to admit of its being regarded as one of the primitive instincts of man, and so peculiarly his own that he may be appropriately designated the _fire-using animal_. Nevertheless, his supposed ignorance of fire during primitive ages has been employed as an argument in confirmation of the idea that the first habitat of man must have been a climate where his unclothed body experienced no discomfort from the changing seasons, and where fruit was found in sufficient abundance to supply his wants without need of artificial preparation.[57]