I
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
Wehave taken a glance at the bridges made by Nature (pp.3-4), and now we have to consider their influence on the genesis and development of handicraft. This difficult study has been neglected by men of science; not even Darwin said a word about natural bridges, though they were models to be copied by the sedulous ape in primitive men; and so we must try to be as thorough as possible, within the limits set by a brief chapter.
Where and how is a beginning to be made? The useful and necessary thing is to visualise the fact that varied hints on bridge-building accompanied the descent of man, so the influence of their utility was active through all the linked growth in that organic chain by which the earliest men and their nearest allies were united. Sooner or later the mere use of natural bridges would generate in some minds a desire to copy them; and although we are quite ignorant as to when this desire came for the first time out of the darkness, yet we may suppose, without any great extravagance, that it belonged to the same period of handicraft as the earliest manufactured tools and weapons, which were a development from stone clubs and spears fashioned intoshape by earthquakes and volcanoes, the first armourers of the Stone Age. As soon as a tribe, guided by a savage of genius, began to copy three or four object-lessons in Nature’s perennial school for mimics, the imitation of several others would be suggested by the same trend of thought, sooner or later. It is reasonable to believe that hand-made weapons preceded hand-made bridges, as hunting and fighting were the strongest motive-powers behind human needs and actions. To slay was the herald of to build, so the first bridges of handicraft ought to be placed in a likely inference among the later doings of Palæolithic hunters and warriors.
A horrible slowness marked each advance from a bad copy of a natural bridge to a slightly better one. In fact, only a few brilliant creative minds—not more than two or three thousand—separate our own social order from the strife of Palæolithic savages. Into the coarse dough of humanity an infrequent genius has put some enchanted yeast. And we must needs believe that the dead routine of imitation, to which human nature has ever been enslaved, held primeval man even more relentlessly than it holds ourselves. One misfortune more than any other delayed a creeping progress: it was the fact that mankind had no cause to fear the most intelligent creatures among the lesser organisms. If snakes and beasts of prey had been as clever as were bees and ants and beavers, men could have saved themselves from extermination by one means only—by a rapid advance from frequent good ideas into great achievements.Day after day the large human brain would have been called upon to produce large protective thoughts, and, had it failed to produce them day after day, the human race would have been food for enterprising rivals. We have no guess why Providence withheld from mankind this high discipline, this fateful choice between death and a swift intelligence; but we do know that the most dangerous of the lesser organisms have been the least quick-witted, and that men in their intercourse with natural things have shown a lethargic mimicry. Their cave-dwellings were stolen from cave-lions and cave-bears; their pit-dwellings were copied from the holes and tunnels burrowed by many animals; and in their lake-dwellings they collected hints from five sources: natural bridges, the platforms built by anthropomorphous apes,[34]the habits of waterfowl, the beavers dam and “lodge,” and the nests of birds. In the round hut, which was made with branches and wattle-and-daub, stick nests were united to the plasterwork of rock-martins. Yes, a good workman in the construction of mud walls does no more than rock-martins have done in all the ages of their nest-building. When these birds make their nests they use wet loam stiffened with bits of straw, and each layer is allowed to harden before another is put on in a thickness of about half an inch for a day’s work.[35]
Even more remarkable is the fact that men may have borrowed from several birds the idea which enabled them to pass from round huts into oblong cabins. In Australia, for instance, there are three birds—genera of the same family—that build arched bowers with long sides; and Darwin tells us to regard them as “co-descendants of some ancient species which first acquired the strange instinct of constructing bowers for performing their love-antics.” One species of Australian bower-birds, the fawn-breasted variety, erects a platform of sticks as a foundation for its gabled hall of courtship, that measures nearly four feet in length and eighteen inches in height. This structure is charmingly decorated, and if we could magnify it to the size of Westminster Hall we should be amazed by its beautiful architecture. Unmagnified, it is a model to all primitive men, for it shows far more invention than a wigwam or than a charcoal-burner’s hut.
As soon as a student begins to understand what mankind has copied in Nature’s wonderful school for mimics, he cannot fail to take delight in natural bridges and their influence on handicraft. At first he is humbled painfully by the small amount of creative wit that a million years or so have gleaned from the big human brain; but soon the novelty of feeling humble is more attractive to him than the vile habit of flattering human nature.[36]