Having, in the last chapter, examined the instruments used by man, we have next to look at the arts by which he maintains and protects himself. His first need is to get his daily food. In tropical forests, savages may easily live on what nature provides, like the Andaman Islanders, who gather fruits and honey, hunt wild pigs in the jungle, and take turtle and fish on the coast. Many forest tribes of Brazil, though they cultivate a little, depend mostly on wild food. Of such the rude man has no lack, for there is game in plenty and the rivers swarm with fish, while the woods yield him a supply of roots and bulbs, calabashes, palm-nuts, beans, and many other fruits; he collects wild honey, birds’ eggs, grubs out of rotten wood, nor does he despise insects, even ants. In less fertile lands savage life goes on well while game and fish abound, but when these fail it becomes an unceasing quest for food, as where the Australians roam over their deserts on the look-out for every eatable root or insect, or the low Rocky Mountain tribes gather pine-nuts and berries, catch snakes, and drag lizards out of their holes with a hooked stick. The Fuegians wander along their bleak inhospitable shores feeding mostly on shellfish, so that in the course of ages their shells, with fish-bones and other rubbish, have formed long banks above high-water mark. Such shell-heaps or “kitchen-middens” are found here and there all round the coasts of the world, marking the old resorts of such tribes; for instance on the coast of Denmark, where archæologists search them for relics of rude Europeans, who, in the Stone age, led a life somewhat like that of Tierra del Fuego. Hunting and fishing go on through all levels of society, beginning with the savages who have no other means of subsistence, till at last among civilized nations game and fish hardly do more than supplement the more regular supplies of grain and meat from the farm. Looking at the devices of the hunter and fisher, it will be seen how thoroughly most of them belong to the ruder stages of culture.

The natives of the Brazilian forests, to whom tracking game is the chief business of life, do it with a skill that fills with wonder the white men who have watched them. The Botocudo hunter, gliding stealthily through the underwood, knows every habit and sign of bird and beast; the remains of berries and pods show him what creature has fed there; he knows how high up an armadillo displaces the leaves in passing, and so can distinguish its track from the snake’s or tortoise’s, and follow it to its burrow by the scratches of its scaly armour on the mud. Even the sense of smell of this savage hunter is keen enough to help him in tracking. Hidden behind the trunk of a tree, he can imitate the cries of birds and beasts to bring them within range of his deadly poisoned arrow, and he will even entice the alligator by making her rough eggs grate together where they lie under leaves on the river-bank. If an ape he has shot high in the boughs of some immense tree remains hanging by its tail, he will go up after it by a hanging creeper where no white man would climb. At last, laden with game and useful forest things, such as palm-fibre to make hammocks, or fruit to brew liquor, he finds his way back to his hut by the sun and the lie of the ground, and the twigs that he bent back for way-marks as he crept through the thicket. In Australia, the native hunter will lie in wait behind a screen of boughs near a water-hole till the kangaroos come to drink, or will track one in the open for days, camping by his little fire at night to be ready for the pursuit again at dawn, keeping unseen and to the leeward till at last he can creep near enough to hurl his spear, seldom in vain. When the natives hunt together, they will put up brush-fence in two long wings converging towards a pit, and so drive the kangaroos into it; or they will form a great hunting party for a battue, surrounding half a mile of bush-land, and with shouts and clatter of weapons driving all the game to the centre where they can close round and despatch them with spears and waddies. In fowling the Australians show equal expertness. A native will swim under water breathing through a reed, or will merely cover his head with water-weed till he gets among a flock of ducks, which one by one he noiselessly pulls under and tucks into his belt. This shows in a simple form a kind of duck-hunting which is found in such distant parts of the world, that travellers have been puzzled to guess whether the idea spread from one tribe to another, or was invented many times. It may be seen on the Nile, where a harmless-looking calabash floats in among the water-fowl, with a swimming Egyptian’s head inside. The Australian hunter takes the wallaby (a small kangaroo) by fastening to a long rod like a fishing-rod a hawk’s skin and feathers, making the sham bird hover with its proper cry till it drives the game into a bush where it can be speared. Of devices of stalking with an imitated animal, one of the most perfect is that of the Dogrib Indians, when a pair of hunters go after reindeer; the foremost carries a reindeer’s head, while in the other hand he has a bunch of twigs against which he makes the head rub its horns in a lifelike way, and the two men, walking as the deer’s fore and hind legs, get among the herd and bring down the finest. In England, till of late years, fowlers used to hide behind a wooden horse moved along on wheels, and a relic of this survives in the phrase “to make a stalking-horse of one,” often now used by people who have no idea what the word meant.

Hunting with dogs was very ancient, and was found among uncivilized tribes; thus the Australians seem to have trained the dingo or native dog for the chase, and most of the North American Indians had their native hunting-dogs. Still dogs were not so universal among rude tribes as they have been since European breeds were carried all over the world; for instance, the natives of Newfoundland seem to have had no dogs. The largest and fiercest animal whose instinct of prey man has thus taken advantage of is the hunting-leopard or cheetah, which in India or Persia is carried in an iron cage to the field and let loose upon the deer; when it has pounced on the game the huntsman draws it off with the taste of blood and gives it a leg for its share in the partnership. Already in classic times there is mention of birds of prey trained to strike game-birds or drive them into the net, or to pounce on hares. Hawking or falconry reached its height as a royal sport in mediæval Tartary, where Marco Polo describes the Great Khan going out, borne by two elephants in his litter hung with cloth of gold and covered with lion-skins, to see the sport of his ten thousand falconers flying their hawks at the pheasants and cranes. From the East hawking spread over Europe. It was familiar to our early English ancestors, and if one had to paint a symbolic picture of the middle ages, one could hardly choose more characteristic figures than the knight and lady riding out with their hooded hawks on their fists. Since then falconry has all but died out in Europe, and nowadays the traveller may best see it in the Asiatic district where it first came up, Persia or the neighbouring countries. In such sports the quest of food (now often contemptuously called “pot-hunting”) becomes subordinate to the excitement of the chase. It was so especially where fleet animals like the deer were hunted on horseback, till at last the royal stag-hunt became a court ceremony with its cavalcades and its great officers of state in splendid uniforms. Such pageantry is, indeed, declining in modern Europe, but the place it used to hold in English court life is shown by noblemen still occupying in the Royal household the places of Master of the Buckhounds and Hereditary Grand Falconer.

The modern hunter has a vastly increased power of killing game, from the use of fire-arms instead of the bow and spear which came down from savage times. The effect of bringing in guns is seen among the native American buffalo-hunters. They were always reckless in destruction when they once came within reach of the herds, but now with the help of the white man and the use of his rifles there is such slaughter that travellers have found the ground and air for miles foul with the carcases of buffalo killed merely for the hides and tongues. In the civilized world, what with killing off game, and what with the encroachment of agriculture on the wild lands, both the supply and the need of game for man’s subsistence have much lessened. But the hunter’s life has been from the earliest times man’s school of endurance and courage, where success and even trial gives pleasure in one of its intensest forms. Thus it has come to be kept up artificially where its practical use has fallen away. In civilized countries it is seen at its best where it keeps closest to barbaric fatigue and danger, like grouse-shooting in Scotland, or boar-hunting in Austria, but at its meanest, where it has come down to shooting grain-fed pheasants as tame as barn-door fowls.

Next, as to trapping game. This was seen in a curiously simple form in Australia, where a native would lie on his back on a rock in the sunshine with a bit of fish in his hand, pretending to be fast asleep, till some hawk or crow pounced on the bait, only to be itself pounced on by the hungry man, who broiled and ate it then and there. A plan of taking game which must have readily suggested itself to rude hunters was the pitfall, in its simplest shape a mere hole too deep for a heavy beast to get out of when it has fallen in. The savage trapper will dig such a pit, and cover it with brushwood or sods, as in Africa the bushmen take the huge hippopotamus and elephant, while in fur-countries the hunters arrange their pitfalls in various ways, the most artificial plan being to cover them with a wooden floor which upsets when trodden on. The word trap, meaning originally step (like German treppe), may have come from its usually being some contrivance for the game to tread on. It is so not only with the pitfall, but with other common kinds of trap, which, when the animal steps on the catch, drop down on it, or pull a noose round it, or let fly a dart at it, all which are plans known in the uncivilized world. The art of catching birds and beasts with a noose, held in the hand or fastened to the end of a stick, is universal. Perhaps the most skilful noosing is that done on horseback by the herdsmen of Mexico, though it should be noticed that their lazo is not a native American invention; it was brought over by the Spaniards with its name, which is simply Latin laqueus, a rope. To use the noose for trapping purposes, it is only necessary to set it in the track where game pass, for them to run their heads into, as the North American Indians do. But the noose may also be attached to a bough bent back so as to spring up when an animal touches it, and catch him. Or a spear may be arranged as the savages of the Malay Peninsula do it, with an elastic bamboo so bent back that when released by the animal it will spear him. The suggestion has been already mentioned (p. 195) that such a spring-trap first led to the invention of the bow and arrow. Actual bows and arrows are set as traps in such countries as Siberia, and the spring-gun is a modern improvement on these.

Lastly, the net is one of the things known to almost all men so far as history can tell. The native Australians net game like ancient Assyrians or English poachers, and are not less skilled in netting wild fowl. To see this art at its height we may look at the pictures of fowling scenes on the monuments of ancient Egypt, which show the great clap-nets taking geese by scores; even the souls of the dead are depicted rejoicing in this favourite sport in the world beyond the tomb.

Among the various arts of the fisherman, one common among rude tribes was easily hit upon. Every day at the turn of the tide at river-mouths and on low shores, and inland near streams after a flood, fish are left behind in the shallow pools. Led by this experience, the savage has wit enough to assist nature, as where the Fuegians put up stake fences on the coast at low-water mark, while in South Africa near the rivers large flats are walled in with loose stones ready for the floods. Thus our fish-weirs and fish-dams are no novelties in civilization. Nor is the device of drugging or narcotizing fish a civilized invention, but to be seen in perfection among the tropical forest-tribes of South America, who use for the purpose a score or so of different plants. There is nothing surprising, however, in its being known to men so rude, for it must often occur by accident, from the branches or fruit of the right kind of euphorbia or paullinia falling into some forest pool, an experiment which the observant native would not be slow to try again. Next, a mode of fishing usual among savages, is spearing, the spear for this being barbed, and often made more effective by the head spreading into several barbed prongs. An account of a native Australian fishing describes him lying athwart his bark canoe, with his spear-point dipping into the water ready to go down without splashing, and what is more remarkable, the fisherman keeping his own eyes under water, so that not only the ripple does not disturb his view, but his aim is not interfered with by the refraction of light which makes it so difficult for a man out of the water to hit an object below the surface. The wilder races also know well how after dark fish come to a light, so that salmon-spearing by torchlight, now that it is no longer so frequent in Scotland or Norway, may be seen in all its picturesqueness among the Indians of Vancouver’s Island. Shooting fish with the bow and arrow, which many low tribes do with wonderful dexterity, may be counted as a variety of fish-spearing. The fish-hook is a contrivance not known to all savage tribes, but some have it, as the Australians who cut their hooks out of shell, and are even known to fish with a hawk’s claw attached to a line. The ancient Egyptian would sit like a modern European angler by a canal or pond, fishing with rod and line; his hook was of bronze. Only fly-fishing seems not to have been known in ancient times. On the whole it is remarkable how little modern fishermen have moved from the methods of the rudest and oldest men. The savage fish-spear, with its three or four barbed prongs, is curiously like that our sailors still use, and call a fish-gig. Only we make the head of iron, not of wood and fish-teeth. So it is with the harpoon used by American whalers, with its loosely fitting point which comes off when the fish is struck, only remaining attached by a long cord to the floating shaft; this is copied, but with a steel point, from the bone-headed harpoon of the Aleutian Islanders. Our fishermen carry on their business on a large scale, with their steam-trawlers and seines which sweep a whole bay, but their net-fishing is much of the same kinds as may be found among the peoples from whom we have here taken our early examples of spearing and angling.

Thus man, even while he feeds himself as the lower animals do, by gathering wild fruit and catching game and fish, is led by his higher intelligence to more artificial means of getting these. Rising to the next stage, he begins to grow supplies of food for himself. Agriculture is not to be looked on as a difficult or out-of-the-way invention, for the rudest savage, skilled as he is in the habits of the food-plants he gathers, must know well enough that if seeds or roots are put in a proper place in the ground they will grow. Thus it is hardly through ignorance, but rather from roving life, bad climate, or sheer idleness, that so many tribes gather what nature gives, but plant nothing. Even very rude people, when they live on one spot all the year round, and the climate and soil are favourable, mostly plant a little, like the Indians of Brazil, who clear a patch of forest round their huts to grow a supply of maize, cassava, bananas, and cotton. When we look at the food-plants of the world, it appears that some few are grown much as in their wild state, like the coco-nut and bread-fruit, but most are altered by cultivation. Sometimes it is possible to find the wild plant and show how man has improved it, as where the wild potato is found growing on the cliffs of Chile. But the origin of many cultivated plants is lost to tradition and has become a subject for tale-tellers. This is the case with those edible grasses which have been raised by cultivation into the cereals, such as wheat, barley, rye, and by their regular and plentiful supply have become the mainstay of human life and the great moving power of civilization. It is clear that the development of these grain-plants from their wild state was before the earliest ages of history, which throws back the beginnings of agriculture to times older still. How ancient was the first tilling of the soil, is shown by ancient Egypt and Babylonia, with their governments and armies, temples and palaces, for it could have been only through carrying on agriculture for a long series of ages that such populations could have grown up so closely packed together as to form a civilized nation. Plants, when once brought into cultivation, make their way from people to people across the globe. Thus the European conquerors of America carried back the maize or Indian corn which had been cultivated from unknown antiquity over the New World, and which now furnishes the Italian peasant with his daily meal of polenta or porridge; it is grown even in Japan, and down to the south of Africa, where it is the “mealies” of the colonist. An English vegetable garden is a curious study for the botanist who assigns to each plant its proper home, and to the philologist who traces its name. Sometimes this tells its story fairly, as where damson and peach describe these fruits as brought from Damascus and Persia. But the potato, brought over in Queen Elizabeth’s time, seems to have borrowed the name of another plant botanically different, the batata, or sweet-potato. The luscious tropical ananas has lost its native Malay name except among botanists, and has taken the name of the common fir-cone or pine-apple, which in shape it so closely resembles.

By noticing how rude tribes till the soil, much is to be learnt as to the invention of agricultural implements. Wandering savages like the Australians carry a pointed stick to dig up eatable roots with, as in Fig. 64 a. Considering how nearly planting a root is the same work as digging one up, it is likely that a tribe beginning to till the soil would use their root-digging sticks for the new purpose; indeed, a pointed stake has been found as the rude husbandman’s implement both in the Old and New World. It is an improvement on this to dig with a flat-bladed tool like a spear, sword, or paddle, and thus we have the civilized spade. A more important tool, the hoe, is derived from the pick or hatchet. The wooden picks of the New Caledonians serve both as weapons and for planting yams, while the African’s hatchet—an iron blade stuck in a club—only has to have the blade turned across to become his hoe. It is curious to find in Europe the rudest imaginable hoe, less artificial than the elk’s shoulder-blade fastened to a stick, with which the North American squaws hoed their Indian corn. This is the Swedish “hack,” Fig. 64 b, a mere stout stake of spruce-fir with a bough sticking out at the lower end cut short and pointed. With this primitive implement in old times fields were tilled in Sweden, and it was to be seen in forest farmhouses within a generation or two. Swedish tradition records the steps by which agriculture improved. The wooden hack was made heavier and dragged by men through the ground, thus ploughing a furrow in the simplest way; then the implement was made in two pieces, with a handle for the ploughman and a pole for the men to drag by, the share was shod with an iron point, and at last a pair of cows or mares were yoked on instead of the men. This seems nearly the way in which, thousands of years earlier, the hoe first passed into the plough. Fig. 65 is from a picture of agriculture in ancient Egypt. Here the labourer is seen following the plough to break up the clods with his peculiar hoe, with its long, curved, wooden blade roped to the handle. Now looking at the plough itself, it is seen to be such a hoe, rope and all, only heavier and provided with a pair of handles for the ploughman to guide and keep it down, while a yoke of oxen drag it through the ground. The valley of the Nile was one of the districts where high agriculture earliest arose, and in the picture here copied we may almost fancy ourselves seeing at its birth the great invention of the plough. To arm it with a heavy metal ploughshare, to shape this so that it shall turn the sod over in a continuous ridge, to fix a coulter or “knife” in front to give the first cut, and to mount the whole on wheels; all these were improvements known in Rome in the classical period. In modern times we have the self-acting plough no longer needing the ploughman to follow at the plough-tail, and the steam-plough has a more powerful draught than oxen or horses. Yet those who have looked at the earlier stages can still discern in the most perfect modern plough the original hoe dragged through the ground.

There survives even now in the world a barbaric mode of bringing land under cultivation, which seems to show us man much as he was when he began to subdue the primæval forest, where till then he had only wandered, gathering wild roots and nuts and berries. This primitive agriculture was noticed by Columbus, when landing in the West Indies he found the natives clearing patches of soil by cutting the brushwood and burning it on the spot. This simple plan, where the wood is not only got out of the way, but the ashes serve for dressing, may still be seen among the hill-tribes of India, who till these plots of land for a couple of years and then move on to a new spot. In Sweden this brand-tillage, as it may be called, is not only remembered as the old agriculture of the land, but in outlying districts it has lasted on into modern days, giving us an idea what the rough agriculture of the early tribes may have been like when they migrated into Europe. It is not to be supposed, on looking at an English farm of the present day, that its improvements were made all at once. The modern farming system has a long and changing history behind it. One interesting point in its growth is that in long-past ages much of Europe was brought under cultivation by village-communities. A clan of settlers would possess themselves of a wide tract of land, and near their huts they would lay out great common fields, which at first they perhaps tilled and reaped in common as one family. It became usual to parcel out this tillage land every few years into family lots, but the whole village-field was still cultivated by the whole community, working together in the time and way settled by the village elders. This early communistic system of husbandry may still be seen not much changed in the villages of such countries as Russia. Even in England its traces have out-lasted the feudal system, and remain in the present days of landlord and tenant. In several English counties there may still be noticed the boundaries of the great common-fields, divided lengthwise into three strips, which again were divided crosswise into lots, held by the villagers; the three divisions were managed on the old three-field system, one lying fallow while the other two bore two kinds of crops.

Next, as to the history of domesticating animals for food. The taming of sociable creatures like parrots and monkeys is done by low forest tribes, who delight in such pets; and very rude tribes keep dogs for guard and hunting. But it marks a more artificial way of life when men come to keep and breed animals for food. The move upwards from the life of the hunter to that of the herdsman is well seen in the far north, the home of the reindeer. Among the Esquimaux the reindeer was only hunted. But Siberian tribes not only hunt them wild, but tame them. Thus the Tunguz live by these herds, which provide them not only with milk and meat, but with skins for clothing and tents, sinews for cord, bone and horn for implements, while as they move from place to place the deer even serve as beasts of draught and burden. Here is seen a specimen of pastoral life of a simple rude kind, and it is needless to go on describing at length the well-known life of higher nomade tribes, who shift their tents from place to place on the steppes of Central Asia or the deserts of Arabia, seeking pasture for their oxen and sheep, their camels and horses. There is a strong distinction between the life of the wandering hunter and the wandering herdsman. Both move from place to place, but their circumstances are widely different. The hunter leads a life of few appliances or comforts, and exposed at times to starvation; his place in civilization is below that of the settled tiller of the soil. But to the pastoral nomade, the hunting which is the subsistence of the ruder wanderer, has come to be only an extra means of life. His flocks and herds provide him for the morrow, he has valuable cattle to exchange with the dwellers in towns for their weapons and stuffs, there are smiths in his caravan, and the wool is spun and woven by the women. What best marks the place in civilization which the higher pastoral life attains to, is that the patriarchal herdsman may belong to one of the great religions of the world; thus the Kalmuks of the steppes are Buddhists, the Arabs are Moslems. A yet higher stage of prosperity and comfort is reached where the agricultural and pastoral life combine, as they already did among our forefathers in the village communities of old Europe just described. Here, while the fields were cultivated near the village, the cattle pastured in summer on the hills and in the woodlands belonging to the community, where also the hunter went for game, while nearer home there were common meadows for pasture and to provide the hay for the winter weather, when the cattle were brought under shelter in the stalls. In countries so thickly populated as ours is now, the last traces of the ancient nomade life disappear when the herds are no longer driven off to the hills in summer.

After the quest of food, man’s next great need is to defend himself. The savage has to drive off the wild beasts which attack him, and in turn he hunts and destroys them. But his most dangerous foes are those of his own species, and thus in the lowest known levels of civilization war has already begun, and is carried on against man with the same club, spear, and bow used against wild beasts. General Pitt-Rivers has shown how closely man follows in war the devices he learnt from the lower animals; how his weapons imitate their horns, claws, teeth, and stings, even to their venom; how man protects himself with armour imitated from animals’ hides and scales; and how his warlike stratagems are copied from those of the birds and beasts, such as setting ambushes and sentinels, attacking in bodies under a leader, and rushing on with war-cries to the fight.

We have already in the last chapter examined the principal offensive weapons. The daubing on of venom to make them more deadly is found among low tribes far over the world. Thus the Bushman mixes serpent’s poison with the euphorbia juice, and the South American native poison-maker, prepared by a long fast for the mysterious act, concocts the paralysing urari or curare in the secret depths of the forest, where no woman’s eye may fall on the fearful process. Poisoned arrows were known to the ancient world, as witness the lines which tell of Odysseus going to Ephyra for the man-slaying drug to smear his bronze-tipped arrows; but Ilos would not give it, for he feared the ever-living gods. Thus it seems that in early ages the moral sense of the higher nations had already condemned the poisoned weapons of the savage, with something of the horror Europeans now feel in examining the Italian bravo’s daggers of the middle ages, with their poison-grooves imitated from the serpent’s tooth.

How the warrior’s armour comes from the natural armour of animals is plainly to be seen. The beast’s own hide may be used, as where one sees in museums the armour of bear-skins from Borneo, or breast-plates of crocodile’s skin from Egypt. The name of the cuirass shows that it was at first of leather, like the buff jerkin. The Bugis of Sumatra would make a breastplate by sewing upon bark the cast-off scales of the ant-eater, overlapping as the animal wore them; and so the natural armour of animals was imitated by the Sarmatians, with their shoes of horses’ hoofs sewed together in overlapping scales like a fir-cone. Such devices, when metal came in, would lead to the scale armour of the Greeks, imitated from fish-scales and serpent-scales, while their chain-mail is a sort of netted garment made in metal. The armour of the middle ages continued the ancient kinds, now protecting the whole body with a suit from head to foot (cap-à-pée) of iron scales, or mail (that is, meshes) or of jointed plates of iron copied from the crab and lobster, such as the later suits of armour which decorate our manorial halls. With the introduction of gunpowder, armour began to be cast aside, and except the helmet, what remains of it in military equipment is more for show than use. The shield also, once so important a part of the soldier’s panoply, has been discarded since the days of musketry. Our modern notion of a shield is that of a large screen behind which the warrior can shelter himself, but this does not appear to have been the original intention. The primitive shield was probably the parrying-shield, used like the narrow Australian parrying-stick, which is only four inches across in the middle where it is grasped, but with which the natives ward off darts with wonderful dexterity. The small round Highland target, one of the varieties of shield which remained latest in civilized Europe, is made to be thus dexterously handled as a weapon of defence, to ward off javelins, or parry the thrust of spear or sword. It is easy to see that such parrying-shields belong to the early kind of warfare where the battle was a skirmish, and every warrior took care of himself. But when fighting in close ranks began, then the great screen-shields would come in, serving as a wall behind which the old Egyptian soldiers could ensconce themselves, or the Greek or Roman storming-party creep up to the foot of the wall in spite of stones and darts hurled down on them.

The savage or barbarian is apt to fall on his enemy unawares, seeking to kill him like a wild beast, especially where there is bitter personal hatred or blood-vengeance. But even among low tribes we find a strong distinction drawn between such manslaughter and regular war, which is waged not so much for mutual destruction as for a victory to settle a quarrel between two parties. For instance, the natives of Australia have come far beyond mere murder when one tribe sends another a bunch of emu-feathers tied to the end of a spear, as a challenge to fight next day. Then the two sides meet in battle array, their naked bodies terrific with painted patterns, brandishing their spears and clubs, and clamouring with taunts and yells. Each warrior is paired with an opponent, so that the fight is really a set of duels, where spear after spear is hurled and dodged or parried with wonderful dexterity, till at last perhaps a man is killed, which generally brings the fray to an end. Among the rude Botocudos of Brazil, a quarrel arising from one tribe hunting hogs on another’s ground might be settled by a solemn cudgelling-match, where pairs of warriors belaboured one another with heavy stakes, while the women fought by scratching faces and tearing hair, till one side gave in. But if in such an encounter the beaten party take to their bows and arrows, the scene may change into a real battle. When it comes to regular war, the Botocudos will draw up their men fronting the enemy, pouring in arrows, and then rushing together with war-whoops to fight it out tooth and nail, killing man, woman, and child. They make expeditions to plunder the villages of their settled neighbours, and when enemies are near in the forest they will stick splinters in the ground as caltrops to lame them, and shoot from ambush behind fallen trunks or shelters of boughs. The slain in battle they will carry off to cook and devour at the feast, where with wild drunken dancing their warlike zeal is inflamed to frenzied rage. Thus to excite courage is the purpose of the frantic war-songs and war-dances, which are common to mankind, among savages and even far more cultured nations. Low tribes also keep up the fierce hatred and pride of battle by trophies of the enemy—his head dried and hung as an ornament of the hut, or his skull fashioned into a drinking-cup. The wars of the North American Indians have picturesque incidents often described in our books, the braves smoking in solemn council of war, the declaration of war by the bundle of arrows wrapped in a rattlesnake’s skin, or the blood-red war-hatchet struck into the war-post, the recruiting-feast where the dog was eaten as emblem of fidelity, the war-party creeping through the woods in single line (which we thence call “Indian file”) the stealthy attack on the enemy’s camp or village, the wild scalp-dance of the returning victors, the torturing of the captives at the stake, where the very children were set to shoot arrows at the helpless foe, who bore his torments without a groan, boasting of his own fierce deeds and taunting his conquerors in his death-agony. Indian war was “to creep like a fox, attack like a panther, and fly like a bird.” Yet at times the warriors of two tribes would meet in fair battle, standing to watch duels between pairs of champions, or all rushing together in a general mêlée.

In the warfare of rude races, it is to be noticed how fighting for quarrel or vengeance begins to pass into fighting for gain. Among some tribes the captives, instead of being slain, are brought back for slaves, and especially set to till the ground. By this agriculture is much increased, and also a new division of society takes place, to be seen still arising among such warlike tribes as the Caribs, where the captives with their children come to form a hereditary lower class. Thus we see how in old times the original equality of men broke up, a nation dividing into an aristocracy of warlike freemen, and an inferior labouring caste. Also forays are made for the warriors to bring home wives, who are the slaves and property of their captors. With this wife-capture is connected the law widely prevailing among the ruder peoples of the world, and lasting on even among the more civilized, that a man may not take a wife from his own clan or tribe, but from some other. As property increases, there appears with it warfare carried on as a business, by tribes living more or less by plunder, glorying in their murderous profession, and despising the mean-spirited farming villagers whose labour provides them with corn and cattle. A perfect example of such a robber-tribe were the Mbayas of South America, whose simple religion it was that their deity, the Great Eagle, had bidden them live by making war on all other tribes, slaying the men, taking the women for wives, and carrying off the goods.

War among civilized nations differs from that of savage tribes in being carried on with better weapons and appliances, and by warriors being trained to fight in regular order. The superiority of a regular army to a straggling savage war-party may be well seen by looking at the pictures in Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians, of troops marching in rank and step to sound of trumpet, especially noticing the solid phalanx of heavy infantry with spear and shield. The strength of such Egyptian solid squares of 10,000 men is described in the Cyropædia (probably with truth as to military tactics if not to actual history), how they could not be broken even by the victorious Persians, but amid the rout of man and horse the survivors still held out, sitting under their shields, till Cyrus granted them honourable surrender. An Egyptian army had its various corps divided into companies, and commanded by officers of regular grades. In battle the heavy immovable phalanx held the centre, the archers and light infantry in the wings acted in line or open order, there were bodies of slingers, and the noble warriors drove their chariots into the thick of the opposing host. This military efficiency was attained by having a standing army formed by a regular military class, trained from youth in the art of war, and maintained by eight acres of land assigned to every soldier. From an early time also we find the Egyptians employing foreign mercenary troops, whose peculiar costumes and faces are conspicuous in the battle-pictures. Thus also the Assyrian war-scenes show that their military system was on a level with that of Egypt. The rise of the science of war to a higher stage belongs to Greece, and the whole history of its growth is told in Greek literature. Beginning with the Iliad, the descriptions there show war and armies in a state more barbaric than in Egypt, with little discipline and less generalship, and encounters of Greek and Trojan champions with the armies looking on as savages would do. But when we come to later ages of Greek history, it is seen that they had by that time not only learnt what the older civilization had to teach, but had brought their own genius to develop it further. Their corps of all arms, archers, charioteers, cavalry, and the phalanx of spearmen, were disciplined and ranged in order of battle much after the ancient Egyptian and Assyrian manner. But whereas in old times a battle had been a trial of mere strength between two armies drawn up facing one another, the military historian Xenophon describes the change made in the art of war by the Theban leader, Epaminondas, when at Leuktra, with forces fewer than the Spartans, he charged with his men in column fifty deep against their twelve deep right wing, and by breaking them threw the whole line into disorder, and won the battle. At Mantineia, carrying out this plan yet more skilfully, he arranged his troops in a wedge-shaped body with the weaker divisions slanting off behind so as to come up when the enemy’s front was already broken. In such ways was developed the science of military tactics, which made skilful manœuvring as important as actual fighting. The Romans, a nation drilled to battle and conquest, came at last to rule the world by the mere force of military discipline. In the middle ages the introduction of gunpowder increased the killing-power of troops whose artillery from bows and arrows became muskets and heavy cannon. The reader’s attention has been already drawn to the military scenes of Egypt and Assyria. If now, fresh from watching the manœuvres of a modern army in sham fight, he will look at these pictures to see war as it was three or four thousand years ago, he will observe how substantially the new system is founded on the old, with developments due to two new ideas, namely, tactics and the use of fire-arms.

Somewhat the same lesson may be learnt by comparing the older and ruder kinds of fortification and siege with those of modern times. Tribes at the level of the Kamchatkans and the North American Indians knew how to fortify their villages with embankments and palisades. In ancient Egypt and Assyria and neighbouring countries, strong and high fortress-walls and towers were defended by archers and slingers, and attacked by storming-parties with scaling-ladders. Old sieges were unscientific, as is so curiously seen in the Homeric poems, where the Greeks encamp over against Troy, but seem to have no notion of regularly investing it, much less of attack by sap and trench. The Greeks and Romans came on to use higher art in fortification and siege, and there appear among them machines of war such as the ancient battering-ram, heavy and skilfully engineered, while contrivances of the nature of huge bows like the catapult led up to the cannon of later ages which superseded them.

Lastly, looking at the army system as it is in our modern world, one favourable change is to be noticed. The employment of foreign mercenary troops, which almost through the whole stretch of historical record has been a national evil alike in war and peace, is at last dying out. It is not so with the system of standing armies which drain the life and wealth of the world on a scale more enormous even than in past times, and stand as the great obstacle to harmony between nations. The student of politics can but hope that in time the pressure of vast armies kept on a war-footing may prove unbearable to the European nations which maintain them, and that the time may come when the standing army may shrink to a nucleus ready for the exigencies of actual war if it shall arise, while serving in peace time as a branch of the national police.