multitudes on a single day as they do now by battle or shipwreck.

The next stage sees huts and skins and fire which softened their bodies,
and marriage and the ties of family which softened their tempers. And
tribes began to make treaties of alliance with other tribes. Speech
arose from the need which all creatures feel to exercise their natural
powers, just as the calf will butt before his horns protrude. Men began
to apply different sounds to denote different things, just as brute
beasts will do to express different passions, as anyone must have
noticed in the cases of dogs and horses and birds. No one man set out to
invent speech.

Fire was first learned from lightning and the friction of trees, and
cooking from the softening and ripening of things by the sun. Then men
of genius invented improved methods of life, the building of cities and
private property in lands and cattle. But gold gave power to the wealthy
and destroyed the sense of contentment in simple happiness. It must
always be so whenever men allow themselves to become the slaves of
things which should be their dependents and instruments.

They began to believe in and worship gods, because they saw in dreams
shapes of preterhuman strength and beauty and deemed them immortal; and
as they noted the changes of the seasons and all the wonders of the
heavens they placed their gods there and feared them when they spoke in
the thunder.

Metals were discovered through the burning of the woods, which caused
the ores to run. Copper and brass came first and were rated above gold
and silver. And then the metals took the place of hands, nails, teeth,
and clubs, which had been men's earliest arms and tools. Weaving
followed the discovery of the use of iron. Sowing, planting, and
grafting were learned from nature herself, and gradually the cultivation
of the soil was carried farther and farther up the hills.

Men learned to sing from the birds, and to blow on pipes from the
whistling of the zephyr through the reeds; and those simple tunes gave
as much rustic jollity as our more elaborate tunes do now.

Then, in a summary passage at the end, Lucretius enumerates all the
chief discoveries which men have made in the age-long process--ships,
agriculture, walled cities, laws, roads, clothes, songs, pictures,
statues, and all the pleasures of life--and adds, "These things practice
and the experience of the unresting mind have taught mankind gradually
as they have prog