hands,[1] though they were so far advanced in the arts as to make and use iron tools, and of course, the very drills worked in this primitive way were pointed with iron.
Fig. 23.
The principle of the common carpenter's brace, with which he works his centre-bit, is applied to fire-making by a very simple device represented in Fig. 23, which is drawn according to Mr. Darwin's description of the plan used by the Gauchos of the Pampas; "taking an elastic stick about eighteen inches long, he presses one end on his breast, and the other (which is pointed) in a hole in a piece of wood, and then rapidly turns the curved part, like a carpenter's centre-bit."[2] The Gauchos, it should be observed, are not savages, but half-wild herdsmen of mixed European, Indian, and African blood, who would probably only use such a means of kindling fire when the flint and steel were for the moment not at hand, and their fire-drill is not only like the carpenter's brace, but most likely suggested by it.
To wind a cord or thong round the drill, so as, by pulling the two ends alternately, to make it revolve very rapidly, is a great improvement on mere hand-twirling. As Kuhn has pointed out, this contrivance was in use for boring in Europe in remote times; Odysseus describes it in telling how he and his companions put out the eye of the Cyclops:—
οἱ μὲν μοχλὸν ἑλόντες ἐλάϊνον, ὀξὺν ἐπ᾿ ἄκρῳ,
ὀφθαλμῷ ἐνέρεισαν• ἐγὼ δ ἐφύπερθεν ἀερθεὶς,
δίνεον• ὡς ὅτε τις ότρυπ δόρυ νήϊυν ἀνὴρ
τρυπάνῳ, οἱ δέ τ' ἔνερθεν ὑποσσείουσιν ἱμάντι
ἁψάμενοι ἑκάτερθε, τὸ δὲ τρέχει εμμενὲς αἰεί.[3]
