The ancient use of pyrites for fire-making is supposed to be embodied in its etymology (πῦρ). Mr. John Evans has pointed out that the lower beds of the same English chalk in which the flint abounds are prolific of pyrites; and he makes the suggestion that the use of a nodule of pyrites for a hammer-stone in the process of manufacturing flint implements, may have led to the discovery of this method of producing fire. But if so, it is a discovery of remote antiquity, for such nodules have been found both in French and Belgian caves, associated with the bones of fossil mammals and worked flints of the palæolithic era. They also occur in the Swiss lake-dwellings, as at Robenhausen, along with neolithic implements.
But pyrites is not always available; and Esquimaux, Fuegians, and Australians practise also the more usual, and probably the more ancient, method of producing fire by friction. The process among the Tahitians and South Sea islanders is pursued in the laboriously artless fashion of rubbing one piece of wood against another; though it is said that, with perfectly dry wood, they obtain fire in this way in two or three minutes. Australian fire-making is effected in nearly the same way; but the American Indians have improved on the process by the use of the bow and drill. Among the Iroquois and other tribes, the drill was provided with a stone whorl, or fly-wheel, to give it momentum; and when rapidly revolved by means of a bow and string, with the point resting on a piece of dry wood, surrounded with moss or punk, sparks are produced in a few seconds, and the tinder is ignited.
The art of fire-making is thus found in use among savage nations, even in the most degraded state: as among the Fuegians, whose wretched condition and repulsive appearance and habits have led travellers to describe them as scarcely human. They are indeed in every way inferior to the Esquimaux. Yet their implements and weapons display remarkable ingenuity and skill; and the origin of the name of their desolate region is traced to the numerous fires seen by the first Spanish discoverers who navigated its coasts.
The aborigines of Australia rival the Fuegians alike in physical and intellectual degradation; but, like them also, have achieved or perpetuated the discovery which lies at the very foundation of all possible civilisation. According to the inconsequential account furnished by a native Australian of their first acquisition of fire:—“A long, long time ago a little bandicoot[[59]] was the sole owner of a fire-brand, which he cherished with the greatest jealousy. So selfish was he in the use of his prize, that he obstinately refused to share it with the other animals. So they held a general council, where it was decided that the fire must be obtained from the bandicoot either by force or strategy. The hawk and pigeon were deputed to carry out this resolution; and after vainly trying to induce the fire-owner to share its blessings with his neighbours, the pigeon, seizing, as he thought, an unguarded moment, made a dash to obtain the prize. The bandicoot saw that affairs had come to a crisis, and, in desperation, threw the fire towards the river, there to quench it for ever. But, fortunately for the black man, the sharp-eyed hawk was hovering near, and seeing the fire falling into the water, with a stroke of his wing he knocked the brand far over the stream into the long dry grass of the opposite bank, which immediately ignited, and the flames spread over the face of the country. The black man then felt the fire, and said it was good.”[[60]]
The discovery of the art of fire-making, prefigured in this rude myth, is intimately associated in the minds of the Australian aborigines with their distinctive ideas of man. According to the mythology of the Booroung tribe, inhabiting the Mallee country, on Lake Tyrill, they were preceded on the earth by a race of Nurrumbunguttias, or old spirits, who had the knowledge of fire; but these were translated to heaven before the black man came into existence. One of them, named War, or the Crow,—the Australian Prometheus,—is now the star Canopus; and he it was who first brought fire back to earth, and gave it to the black men.[[61]]
It is a noticeable fact that, while the Maoris of New Zealand use the same word, ahi, for fire, which under slight modifications is employed through widely severed island groups of the Pacific: different Australian tribes use distinct names for it, as darloo at Moreton Bay, koyung at Lake Macquarrie, and kaubi at Bathurst. In the Kamilarai of Wellington Valley it is called koyan; while in the Wiradurei, spoken about 200 miles inland from Lake Macquarrie, it is win. Such diversity of names for the common acquisition proves that fire is no recent novelty derived from a single source by the savage tribes of that strange southern continent.
Amid all the remarkable evidence recently disclosed relative to the antiquity and the rude arts of primitive man, nothing has yet appeared suggestive of a condition inferior to the savages of Tierra del Fuego or Australia; while much tends to an opposite conclusion. Alike in physical development and in arts, the Troglodytes of the Dordogne caves were undoubtedly far in advance of either; and yet they were the contemporaries of the mammoth, the Siberian rhinoceros, the cave- lion and bear, the gigantic Irish elk, the reindeer, and the fossil horse of Central Europe,—the men of a period separated from our own by epochs the duration of which can be gauged by no standards of historical chronology. It could scarcely admit of doubt that such men were capable of achieving the art of fire-making. It might even be questioned if they could have subsisted under the conditions of life marking that post-glacial epoch without the use of fire. But on this subject we are not left to conjecture.
The contents of the Aurignac cavern, in the department of the Haute-Garonne, at the foot of the Pyrenees, were at first supposed to disclose a singularly interesting example of sepulture contemporaneous with the fossil mammals of the drift; and accompanied not only with implements and personal ornaments fashioned from their bones and tusks, as well as others of flint; but with the ashes of the funeral fires and the débris of the funeral feast which formed a part of the last rites to the dead. Unfortunately some discredit has been cast on the evidence which seemed to indicate that the remains of extinct mammalia, and those of the entombed dead, were contemporaneous; and the importance of the deductions which this discovery seemed to justify render it all the more needful that the proof should be indisputable. But the practice of regular interment of the dead, accompanied with some funeral rites, by the men of the post-glacial age, is suggested by the contents of the sepulchral recess of Cro-Magnon, in the valley of the Vézère. No ashes of funeral fires can be pointed to, but the traces of the use of fire are abundant.
Throughout the floors of various caves in this district which have been rich in disclosures of primitive art, particles of charcoal abound at every level where broken bones occur, suggesting that fires were in daily use, and were employed for cooking much more than for warmth. Possibly, indeed, those caverns were only the summer dwellings of the Drift-Folk of post-glacial times; and with them, as with the Esquimaux, and the Indians of North America generally, fire may have been valued as a protection against the noxious insects which, especially in the brief summer of a rigorous climate, render life intolerable. Fire is the universal servant of man. The Esquimaux and the Red Indian ward off the mosquito, the black-fly, and the sand-fly by means of a “smudge” made with the smoke of grass and green-wood; while the Hottentot or Bushman kindles his night-fire in the tropics as the most effectual guardian against beasts of prey. Everywhere, and at all epochs, fire appears as one of the most characteristic indices of rational man; and as we study such traces of him as reappear for us in the works of art and the extinguished fires of the Moustier and Madelaine cave-dwellings, or those of the neolithic, if not an earlier period of the Aurignac catacomb, we see the unmistakable evidences of human intelligence; and anew concur in the decision of Columbus, that the night-torch of the Guanahanè savage was indisputable proof that the unknown world which lay before him was the habitation of man.
It may be doubted if man has anywhere existed without the knowledge of fire. By means of it some of his earliest triumphs over nature have been achieved. With its aid his range is no longer limited to latitudes where the spontaneous fruits of the earth abound at every season. The use of fire lies at the root of all the industrial arts. The friendly savages found by Columbus on the first-discovered island of the New World were armed with wooden lances, hardened at the end by its means. The most civilised among the nations conquered by Cortes and Pizarro, had learned by the same means to smelt the ores of the Andes, and make of their metallic alloys the tools with which to quarry and hew the rocks, to sculpture the statues of the gods of Anahuac, and the palaces and temples of the Peruvian children of the sun. Without fire the imperfect implements of the stone period would be altogether inadequate to man’s necessities. By its help he fells the lofty trees, against which his unaided stone hatchet would be powerless. It plays a no less important part in preparing the log-canoe of the savage, than in propelling the wonderful steamship, by means of which the great lakes and rivers of the New World have become the highways of migrating nations.