H. Wells - The World Set Free

power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength

of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire

by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and

then with iron, increased and varied and became more elaborate

and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made his way

easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social

relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of

labour. He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed

contrivance, each making it possible for a man to do more.

Always down the lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and

again, he is doing more… A quarter of a million years ago the

utmost man was a savage, a beingscarcely articulate, sheltering

in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a

fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed

by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity

declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would

have sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical

river valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his

little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so.

He knewno future then, no kind of life except the life he led.

He fled the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the

promise of sword and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of

coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that would one day make

cups of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked

and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at the birds that

soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became aware of the scent

of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless

precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great

individualist, that original, he suffered none other than

himself.

So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this

ancestor of all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing

almost imperceptibly.

Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened

the tiger's claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus

to the swift grace of the horse, was at work upon him-is at work

upon him still. The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him

were killed soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker

eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by

age, the implements were a little better made, the man a little

more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He became more

social; his herd grewlarger; no longer did each man kill or

drive out his growingsons; a system of taboos made them

tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after

he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the rest

of mankind. (But they were forbidden to touchthe women of the

tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and

each son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger

of the Old Man should be roused. All the world over, even to this

day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now

instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better

tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the

creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him,

storing food-until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted

again and gave a first hint of agriculture.

And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.

Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his

lusts and his fearswere all appeased, when the sun shone upon

the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his

eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued

it and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the

river brink between his fingers, and found a pleasurein its

patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the formof vessels,

and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming

river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant

water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamtthat perhaps he

might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place

amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his

brother that once indeed he had done so-at least that some one

had done so-he mixed that perhaps with another dreamalmost as

daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith

began fiction-pointing a way to achievement-and the august

prophetic procession of tales.

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations

that life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the

ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy

eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of

polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or

fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did

humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the

beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, that first

story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed

under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous

listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most

marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the

mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch

the sun.

Section 2

That dreamwas but a moment in a man's life, whose proper

business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget

after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the

beasts. About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were

the untouched sources of Power, whose magnitude we scarcely do

more than suspect even to-day, Power that could make his every

conceivable dreamcome real. But the feet of the race were in

the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.

At last, in the generouslevels of warm river valleys, where food

is abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his

earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less

urgently, more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a

larger community. There began a division of labour, certain of

the older men specialised in knowledgeand direction, a strong

man took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and king

began to develop their roles in the opening drama of man's

history. The priest's solicitude was seed-time and harvest and

fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred river

valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were

already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They

flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the

future, for as yet writing had still to begin.

Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable

wealth of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He

tamed certain animals, he developed his primordially haphazard

agriculture into a ritual, he added first one metal to his

resources and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron

and lead and gold and silver to supplement his stone, he hewed

and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his river until he

came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made the first roads.

But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and more, was the

subjugation of himselfand others to larger and larger societies.

The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power;