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Passing now to other departments of human culture, we must deal in the next place with the basic “arts of life”; that is, the modes of conducting the necessary activities of every day.  All men of all times, be they civilized or savage, are impelled like the brutes by their biological nature to seek food and to repel their foes.  The rough stone club and ax were fashioned by the first savage men, when diminishing physical prowess placed them at a disadvantage in the competition with stronger animals.  Smoother and more efficient weapons were made by the hordes of their more advanced descendants, some of whom remained in the mental and cultural condition of the stone age like the Fuegian, until the white travelers of recent centuries brought them newer ideas and implements.  In Europe and elsewhere the period of stone gave place to the bronze and iron ages, and throughout the changing years human inventiveness improved the missile and weapon to become the bow and arrow of medieval civilization and recent African savagery.  The artillery and shells of modern warfare are their still more highly evolved descendants.

So it is with the dwellings of men, and the significance of the changes displayed by such things.  The cave was a natural shelter for primitive man as well as for the wolf, and it is still used by men to-day.  Where it did not exist, a leafy screen of branches served in its stead; even now there are human beings, like the African pygmy and the Indian of Brazil, who are little beyond the orang-outang as regards the character of the shelter they construct out of vegetation.  From such crude beginnings, on a par with the lairs and nests of lower animals, have evolved the grass huts of the Zulu, the bamboo dwelling of the Malay, the igloo of the Arctic tribes, and the mud house of the desert Indians.  The modern palace and apartment are merely more complex and more elaborate in material and architectural plan, when compared with their primitive antecedents.

Baskets, clay vessels, and other household articles testify in the same way to an evolution of the mental views of the people making them.  The means of transportation are even more demonstrative.  The wagon of the early Briton was like a rough ox-cart of the present day, evolved from the simple sledge as a beginning.  In its turn it has served as a prototype for all the conveyances on wheels such as the stage-coach and the modern Pullman.  The history of locomotives, employed in the first chapter to develop a clear conception of what evolution means, takes its place here as a demonstration of the way human ideas about traction have themselves evolved so as to render the construction of such mechanisms possible.