CHAPTER I.
The word “Enterprise,” which, it has just been observed, marks the character of the civilized man as distinguished from the savage, might also be used with some degree of strictness to characterise man as distinguished from the lower animals. Their instincts enable some of them, as the bee and the beaver, to perform works of wondrous ingenuity; but none of them step beyond what has been the vocation of their species since it existed. The bounds of human exertion, on the other hand, are apparently illimitable. Its achievements in one generation, though deemed wonderful, are outstripped in the next; and the latest successful efforts of courage and skill serve to give us confidence that much or all which yet baffles man’s sagacity and power in the realm of nature shall be eventually subjected to him; he is a being of Enterprise.
If endowed simply with bounded instincts he might have remained the wild inhabitant of the forest covert, or continued the rude tenant of the savage hut; his limitless, or, at least, indefinite and ever-progressing mental capacity, has empowered him to overcome obstacle after obstacle in the way to his increasing command over Nature; the triumphs of one generation have been handed down to the next, and the aggregate to those ages succeeding; and the catalogue of these “Triumphs of Enterprise” would now form a library of incalculable extent, since it would lead reflection into every path of the dominions of history and natural philosophy, of science and art.
The rudest display of this great characteristic of man is the assertion of his superiority to the rest of the animal world, and seems to offer a primary claim to observation. The stronger and fiercer animals would be the first enemies with which man had to struggle. With his conquest of their strength and ferocity, and subjection of some of their tribes to his use and service, his empire must have begun. Had we authentic records remaining of the earliest human essays towards taming the dog, domesticating the cat, and training for beneficial use or service the goat, the sheep, and the ox, the horse and the elephant, the camel, the llama, and the reindeer, such a chronicle would be filled with interest. Fable, however, surrounds the scanty memorials that remain of this as well as of higher departments of human discovery in the primeval ages. Abundant material exists in ancient history for a narrative of the more exciting part of these triumphs—the successful display of man’s courage as opposed to the mightier strength of the more ferocious animals; but the accounts of such adventures in later times are less doubtful, and a brief recapitulation of a few of them will serve equally well to introduce the “Triumphs of Enterprise.”