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fanciful and exaggerated; but, if you consider how every human industrial art stands directly or indirectly related to fire, whilst no animal art does, you will not regard the statement as extravagant. And civilized man, as much as his savage brother, is a fire-worshipper in his practical doings. The great conquering peoples of the world have been those who knew best how to deal with fire. The most wealthy of the active nations are those which dwell in countries richly provided with fuel. No inventions have changed the entire world more than steam and gunpowder. We are what we are, largely because we are the ministers and masters of fire.
Clotheless creatures by birth, we are also tool-less ones. Every other animal is by nature fully equipped and caparisoned for its work; its tools are ready for use, and it is ready to use them. We have first to invent our tools, and then to fashion them, and then to learn how to handle them. Man's marvellous hand is, no doubt, in itself an exquisite instrument of art; but, after all, our hands are less adroit than those of the monkey, who has four, each equivalent to a right hand, whilst the handiest of us is only ambidextrous. Our right hands would be nothing to us, but for our wise heads; for we have to begin two steps farther back, in our industrial labours, than the meanest of the animals, who practise no such craft as that of tool-making, and serve no apprenticeship to any craft. Two-thirds at least of our industrial doings are thus preliminary. Before two rags can be sewed together, we require a needle, which embodies the inventiveness of a hundred ingenious brains, and a hand, which only a hundred botchings and failures have, in the lapse of years, taught to use the instrument with skill.
It is so with all the crafts, and they are inseparably dependent on each other. The mason waits on the carpenter for his mallet, and the carpenter on the smith for his saw; the smith on the smelter for his iron, and the smelter on the miner for his ore. Each, moreover, needs the help of all the others—the carpenter the smith, as much as the smith the carpenter; and both the mason, as much as the mason both. This helplessness of the single craftsman is altogether peculiar to the human artist. The lower animals are all polyartists, and never heard of such a doctrine as that of the division of labour. The same bee, for example, markets, and bakes bee-bread, and manufactures sugar, and makes wax, and builds storehouses, and plans apartments, and nurses the royal infants, and waits upon the Queen, and apprehends thieves, and smites to the death the enemies
