survived only as some mythic legend, like the Manco Capac of their own Incas, or the Mawai of the Polynesian archipelago. ----- [66] _What is Technology? an Inaugural Lecture._ By George Wilson, M.D., Regius Professor of Technology, Edinburgh University. [67] _Conquest of Peru_, vol. i. B. I. ch. ii. CHAPTER VII. TOOLS. MAN THE ARTIFICER—THE LAW OF REASON—INDIGENOUS RACES—MAN’S CAPACITY FOR DETERIORATION—WHAT IS A STONE-PERIOD?—MATERIALS OF PRIMITIVE ART—SUCCESSION OF RACES—INDICATIONS OF ANCIENT TRADE—THE SHOSHONE INDIAN—TEXAS IMPLEMENTS—MODES OF HAFTING— DEER’S-HORN SOCKETS—STONE KNIVES—THLINKETS OF ALASKA—METALS OF A STONE PERIOD—ARTS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC—MALAYAN INFLUENCE —FIJIAN CONSTRUCTIVE SKILL—FIJIAN POTTERY—SLOW MATURITY OF RACES—THE FLINT-EDGED SWORD—THE LEAGUE OF THE FIVE NATIONS— IROQUOIS PREDOMINANCE—WORK IN OBSIDIAN AND FLINT—HONDURAS FLINT IMPLEMENTS—SOURCES OF THE MATERIAL—COLLISION OF RACES— FATE OF INFERIOR RACES. As the type of oceanic migration, the canoe claims a prominent place among the primitive arts of man. In it we see the germs of commerce, maritime enterprise, and much else that is indispensable to any progress in civilisation. But the primitive ship implies the existence of tools; and, as we have seen, probably owed its earliest fashioning to the useful service of fire. Intelligent design was working out the purposes of reason by processes which, even in their most rudimentary stage, reveal the characteristics of a new order of life, compared with which the tool-born ant, the spider, and the bee, seem but as ingenious self-acting machines, each made to execute perfectly its one little item in the comprehensive plan of creation. As industrial artificers, the creatures so far beneath us in the scale of organisation seem often to put to shame our most perfect workmanship; yet provided with no other instruments than the eye and the hand, but guided by that intelligent reason which distinguishes man from the brutes, we see him, even as an artificer, presenting characteristics which are altogether wanting in the lower animals. Labour is for them no sternly imposed necessity, but an inevitable process, having only one possible form of manifestation; producing in its exercise the highest enjoyment the labourer is capable of; and in its results leading our thoughts from the wise, unerring, yet untaught worker, to Him whose work it is, and of whose wisdom and skill the workmanship, not less than the workman, appears a direct manifestation. It is not so with man. The capacity of the workman is a divine gift, but the work is his own, and too often betrays, in some of its most ingenious devices and results, anything rather than a divine origin.