The first, who seems to have existed after the age in which the black
race colonised Australia, must have been surely a man worthy to hold rank
with our Brindleys, Watts, and Stephensons. For he invented (and mind,
one man must have invented the thing first, and by the very nature of it,
invented it all at once) an instrument so singular, unexpected, unlike
anything to be seen in nature, that I wonder it has not been called, like
the plough, the olive, or the vine, a gift of the immortal gods: and yet
an instrument so simple, so easy, and so perfect, that it spread over all
races in Europe and America, and no substitute could be found for it till
the latter part of the fifteenth century. Yes, a great genius was he,
and the consequent founder of a great aristocracy and conquering race,
who first invented for himself and his children after him a--bow and
arrow.

The next--whether before or after the first in time, it suits me to speak
of him in second place--was the man who was the potential ancestor of the
whole Ritterschaft, Chivalry, and knightly caste of Europe; the man who
first, finding a foal upon the steppe, deserted by its dam, brought it
home, and reared it; and then bethought him of the happy notion of making
it draw--presumably by its tail--a fashion which endured long in Ireland,
and had to be forbidden by law, I think as late as the sixteenth century.
A great aristocrat must that man have become. A greater still he who
first substituted the bit for the halter. A greater still he who first
thought of wheels. A greater still he who conceived the yoke and pole
for bearing up his chariot; for that same yoke, and pole, and chariot,
became the peculiar instrument of conquerors like him who mightily
oppressed the children of Israel, for he had nine hundred chariots of
iron. Egyptians, Syrians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans--none of them
improved on the form of the conquering biga, till it was given up by a
race who preferred a pair of shafts to their carts, and who had learnt to