"Man is a Tool-using Animal.... He can use Tools, can devise Tools; with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing—with Tools he is all."—Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.
CHAPTER II
TOOLS
You can do a great deal with very few tools. The bearing of this observation lies in "the application on it," as Jack Bunsby would say.
Look at the complicated and ingenious curiosities whittled with a jack-knife by sailors, prisoners, and other people who have time to kill in that way! Have you ever seen the Chinese artisans turning out their wonderful work with only a few of the most primitive tools? But of course we cannot spend time so lavishly on our work as they do, even if we had their machine-like patience and deftness acquired through so many generations.
We cannot hold work with our feet and draw saws towards us or do turning out on the lawn with a few sticks and a bit of rope for a lathe; carve a set of wonderful open-work hollow spheres, each within the other, out of one solid ball of ivory; and the rest of the queer things the Orientals do: but it is merely a matter of national individuality—the training of hundreds of generations. We could learn to do such things after a long time doubtless, but with no such wonderful adaptability as the Japanese, for instance, are showing, in learning our ways in one generation.
Fig. 1.
Examine some of the exquisite work which the Orientals sell so cheaply and think whether you know anyone with skill enough to do it if he had a whole hardware-shop full of tools, and then see with what few simple and rude tools (like those shown in the following illustrations, or the simple drill, Fig. 1, still in use) the work has been done. Mr. Holtzapffel describes the primitive apparatus in use among the natives of India as follows[4]:
Fig. 2.