INVENTIONS WE OWE TO SAVAGES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2785, 31 July 1907, Page 87

INVENTIONS WE OWE TO SAVAGES.

(By T. C. Bridges, in the Grand Magazine.)

■Civilisation owes a greater debt to the savage than it knows or acknowledges. Many of the inventions we moderns pride ourselves most upon are but adaptations of the ruder, devices of aboriginal man. Almost every day the truth of the old •aying that there is nothing new under the sun receives fresh proof. The researches of archaeologists have shown that ihe ancient Egyptians used bone collar studs and babies feeding-bottles similar in shape to those made to-day. The Moors ■ had rubber stamps as much as a thousand years ago, and the same race sent sunsignals By means of the heliograph many centuries before our army adopted this supposedly novel invention. ; According to Lady Lugard, the inhabi- ' tants of Tnnfcnctoo, in the sixteenth oentwy, had orchestras and concerts, played chess, and possessed fine libraries'; and in 1618 a man went from Jenae to limbuctoo to undergo a successful operation for cataract. Hindu men of medicine understood the ■ pfeture of disease germs and of bacilli before William the Conqueror ascended the throne of England ; and at a museum in MoTemberg is to be seen a magazine rifle dating back to the fifteenth century. Safety pins are found in the ruins of Pompeii, a~ magnifying giass was -dug up in ' the remains of Nineveh j while no finer 6teel has ever been produced than was forged by the artificers of Damascus in > tbe days of the Crusades. Facts of this kind are sufficiently ha- ' initiating to our vanity, yet hardly so damaging as the discovery that very many of those inventions of which we are most prond originated, not in the minds of tbe civilised "races of to-day, but in those of . tribes of red. black, or brown men whom I we are accustomed to designate as savage. ' What is the fastest form of sailing craft? "A modern racing yacht" is doubtless theanswer which most men would" promptly give. They are doubly wrong, for in the first place a large sailing vessel is faster than any yacht afloat, and, in the second, there is a craft which will beat even the Australian dipper or the five-masted American schooner. That is the flying proa of the Pacific eavage. These marvellous little boats can not only outsail anything else which moves by wind power, but can beat most steamers. Twenty knots an hour is tbe .speed with which they are credited. We have borrowed from native races the idea of ihe double hull; and the catamaran is one of the most popular craft in the shallow waters of the Atlantic sea- j board of the United States. , Speaking of boats, one of the forms most frequently seen upon English rivers is the so-called Canadian canoe. Here is a purely savage invention m Red Indian patent upon which civilisation has failed to improve. There is no other craft which,. while itself weighing so little, carries so large a cargo and is withal so easily propelled, so elastic, and so seaworthy as the true birch-back canoe of the North American Indian. The paddle is the customary method employed by ihe eavage for propelling his craft. Bat the oar is not a white man's invention, for centuries unnumbered the Eskimo has moved his "umiak," or heavy boat, by means of oars, the rowlocks being ingeniously supplied by loops of raw hide linked together. J Nearly all onr carpenters' tools are ! savage 5n origin. The sources of the knife and hammer are lost in the dim mists of the remote past, and soch tools in one form or another have been found in the possession of even the lowest and most degraded tribes. But aboriginal races are responsible for other and far more elaborale tools; the cross-cut saw, for instance. More than one tribe has evolved a saw. The Polynesian islandete made an ingenious and fairly useful instrument by insert- . ins sharks' teeth into a handle of wood. Other savages use a thin strip of wood or bone in connection with moistened sand, and are thus able to cut through stone or other hard substances. Many dark-skinned tribes, when first discovered, were found to possess drills. The shaft is usually of wood, the point of intensely hard stone, such as jade. By means -of drills the Samoan natives can bore holes in the shanks of their beauti-fully-fashioned pearlshell fishhooks. Tools of one kind or another were evolved simultaneously by different races in different parts of the world. It cannot be definitely asserted that we Europeans owe any of the contents of our carpenters' chests directly to the savage. Certain common inventions, however, there are which appear to have come to us almost ' unchanged from the tribes which evolved them. Among these tribes the Eskimo stand first. These little people,, whose existence has for centuries past been one long struggle against the bitter cold and fierce storms of an Arctic climate, have developed an ingenuity positively amazing. Certainly the sledge was known in Europe long before the discovery of the New World, yet never in so perfect a form as that devised by the Arctic peoples. Th<» proof is that the white inhabitants of •Canada and the North-west, as well as all Arctic and Antarctic explorers, have adopted the Eskimo form of sledge, and in Alaska and other parts of the Far North employ dogs to pull them with harness of tbe Eskimo pattern. Snowshoas, both of the European and Canadian patterns, appear to be derived directly from savages. The long Norwegian ski are probably a . Lapp invention. The Canadian snowshoe, | made of a frame of tough wood supporting a web of raw hide, is practically identical with that which the first settlers found the Indians using, and is very similar to that which the Eskimo wear to-day. •, Snow-spectacles are also believed to be, in their original form, am Eskimo inveji- : tion. These people protect their eyes from ■ the glare by little cups >f wood with narrow slits cut across the bottom - and inverted over the eyes. May it not be < possible that motor-car goggles are the ■

lineal descendant of the Eskimo snowspectacles? Pemmican, which the arly fur-trading explorers of tine North-west found in universal use as a winter food among the Indian tribes, was introduced into the British navy victualling yards for the purpose of supplying Arctic expeditions with a portable, easily preserved, and nourishing food. There seems no doubt that this purely savage preparation was the origin of all ihe potted meats of wihich we now have such a vast and ■appetising variety. But there are more foods than pemmican which we, tl»e ultra-civilised, owe to primitive races. Whenever a sago pudding comes up for luncheon we should remember that this extremely Bight and wholesome food was discovered, by the natives of Ceram, and was prepared and eaten by them centuries before it ever came to Europe. To-day this country gets through 15,000 tons of sago yearly. On his first voyage Columbus found th<» natives cultivating the yam, or sweet potato. This vegetable is not much eaten in England/ but in the United States, in South Europe, and in many other parts of the world it is a staple food. The world at large would not suffer naif so much if the ordinary white potato — the "Irish" potato, as they call it in the States — were suddenly to disappear, -\& it would were ihe yam' to be exterminated. Maize is one of the three most 'mport-ant cereals. Yet in spite of its common name — "Indian corn" — there are probably few of us who remember that tnis plant forms another portion of our debt to the savage. Maize was originally derived from a wild grass, the euchloena, and as a sound variety of maize was. found by the early white explorers of the New World in cultivation by aboriginal races, it is per-inissib-le to presume that it was these people who domesticated and improved it. While on the subject of plants we must certainly not forget that greatest boon or greatest curse of modern civilisation, according to the point of view the reader takes — tobacco. Its very name indicates its savage origin, for the word tobacco is supposed to be derived from tabac, the Carib name of fche instrument in which the West Indian natives smoked the leaf. The cigar is another purely savage invention. Columbus found the natives rolling tobacco in maize leaves into a cylindrical shape for smoking purposes, and the modern cigar differs only from these early ernes in the matter of wrapper. Is it not ratter a startling fact that the British revenue is a gainer to the extent of more than 13i millions a year from a plant the use of which was purely a savage discovery? The finest, coolest, and most costly head coverings in the world were invented and are to-day made by brown men. I refer td the so-called Panama hats, for one of which' his Majesty ohe King is said to have paid £80 «n the summer of 11902 ; while M. Jean de Beszke is credited with having given £120 for a hat of the same description. How Panama hats got their name is aomething of a mystery, for they certainly do not come from the neighbourhood of tihe ill-fated isthmus. The best of these hats are made in Ecuador by native labour. The fibre is derived from a certain grass which grows in, the country, and aJso from palm leaves. It takes a lifetime of training to become an adept in the weaving of a Panama, and probably no i>ther craftsman but a native would possess the almost miraculous patience needful to split the fibre to the thinness of sewing cotton, and io spend weeks and even months in the ielicale plaiting. Actually, in making the imer kinds of hats, the weaving has to be ione under water in order to prevent t»he Sbre from becoming too brittle for use. No product of machinery can vie with these specimens of genii-savage handiwork, i Fhe perfect Panama is light as a feather, san be folded up like a silk handkerchief, md even if run over by a loaded cart can be straightened out, washed, and made to l-aok as good as new. The Zuni Ind -ans of Mexico deserve txj he reckoned among the finest handicraftsmen in the world. No possession is more greatly prized by the Western cowboy than a Zuni blanket, or "zarape."' .These are so beautifully woven — all the work being done by hand — that some of the best are actually almost, as waterproof %-i an oilskin "slicker." No otter fabric known is at onoe so light and so warm. I"he patterns, which have remained unchanged for centuries, are geometrical and the dyes are native. Mention of dyes calls to mind the fact that at least -one of our mce.t beautiful af modern dv-es must be counted airong :he inventions which we owe "to savage races. That is cochineal. The i»sect svhich produces this lovely scarlet, and the nopal plant on which tihe insect feeds, frere discovered and cultivated in Mexico [ong before the Spaniairds readied that and were brought by them to Europe. A cashmere shawl of the best quality s worth as much as three hundred pounds. For warmth and elasticity such a shawl s incomparable, and the patterns, said :o be derived from the graceful curves of >he River Jhelum, iiave been widely hni-:at-ed in English and Scottish manufacories. Perhaps it would hardly be fair :o class the Kashmiris as savages, seeing hat in some respects their civilisation s nuch older than our own. Still, they aTe i, coloured race, and their beautiful shawls lave been made with the same perfection md without the aid of machinery since a ong time previous to their first contact pith Europeans. The shawls are woven >v rude looms, many of which have been ised for generations, and the making of i pair of shawls will ocupy three or four nen for a year. The hair of which they re made is so fine that it takes tbe leeces of 10 goats to make one shawl a ard and a-half square, and weighing no aore tban 30 ounces. It is difficult to say whether the builders >f the first of tihe modern iron and steel uspension bridges did or did not get the iea from the bamboo suspension bridge |

. which Oriental natives nave been accus- ■ tomed to build for many centuries past. , We have historical record of a suspension [ bridge built across the Im-jin River, in L Korea, in the year 1592. There was at i that time a war in progress between the . Chinese and the Koreans on one side and the Japanese on the other. The Japanese, \ defeated, withdrew across the river, md . it was to enable the Chinese forces to cross that the Koreans built a suspension ' bridge out of great cables twisted from a native vine called ehik. JThe bridge was 150 yards long, but so well built that an army of 120,000 men crossed upon it in , safety. The Dyaks build amazing susI pension bridges out of bamboo- the natives j of New Gtiinea, though nsnally supposed : I to be degraded savages, are experts in the same art ; and when Pizarro marched through Peru he found terrific mountain gorges spanned by stout suspension bridges made of twisted lianas, and capable of bearing very heavy weights. No science "s newer amongst us than medicine. It is only comparatively recently that the horrible and filthy superstitions and compounds of mediaeval phari macy became extinct. The savage of two j or three centuries ago was enormously the superior of his. white contemporary in the heading art, and though it is difficult to trace the useful drugs or medical processes from their native sources to European medicine chests, yet without doubt many white doctors and men of science have gained, useful hints from the pharmacopoeia of the co-called savage. As we all know, one of our most valuable drugs — quinine — was brought to Europe from Peru. But, on the other hand, we have no direct evidence that the native races employed the bark of the cinchona tree as medicine. But we do know that the Indian peimans, or medicine-men of South America, understand and use curative herbs, vervain, hen-weed, and many others, and have cured fevers by the aid of medicine of their own composition. They also understand ' inoculation for fevers, and there are instances on record J of Europeans having been cured by this j process when all "white men's medicines" failed utterly of their object. The Curados de calaber, in the countries bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, are | proof from serpent's bites, their immunity having, it is said, been secured by inoculation with a mixture of snake venom and the juice of the mano del sapo, or "toad'shand." The Gallas, of British East Africa, are believed to have employed vaccination to secure immunity from small- ' pox long before Jenner's discovery. They ; inoculated in the nose, not the arm. In j days when the unfortunate English i patient was packed tight in a hot bed in j a 6tuffy room, secluded from -every breath lof fresh air, the Zulus carried their wounded to high mountains, well awaxe , that pure hill-top air is the best of Naj ture's antiseptics. 1 It has only been possible here to skim the surface of this subject. But perhaps •enough has been said to convince the reader that savag.es are not «o savage as | many suppose, and that white races need , not be too proud to admit the debt which ' they certainly owe to native races, nor I meanly kick away the footstool upon which they have risen.