Man the slave & master / by Mark Graubard.

  • Graubard, Mark, 1904-1992.
Date:
1939
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Man the slave & master / by Mark Graubard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    set of tablets came down from Sinai as a gift of God to man, but it is certainly true that nothing else came down with them. Whatever man has to-day to make life easier, and whatever he has gleaned of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, is the product of his labour and inventive ness. Thousands perished before man learned that some mushrooms are poisonous and others edible, some seeds tasty and others harmful. It is easy to say that God gave us bread, but such words are only metaphorical. If God gave us anything it was but a jungle, wilderness, or desert, filled with a variety of plants and animals among which man wandered, poorly protected and not knowing how to satisfy his wants. God gave him no bread. Man found some miserable fruits and seeds which he did not distinguish at first from bark or dung, and which he had to taste and take the consequences thereof, before he learned to identify those that were edible and then cultivate and make them palatable by all kinds of devices. It took man thousands of years to discover the grain- producing plants, learn the art of irrigation, invent fire, devise means of grinding seeds into flour, attempt to sow and plough, to use yeast and bake. Every step was laborious and consumed centuries, and waited moreover for inventive persons able to add to what was already known and carry this elementary and vital knowledge a bit further. Thus, what we call bread to-day involved thousands of years of labour, blind and costly trial and error, and the ingenuity of innumerable minds who appeared here and there, or pooled devices as best they could. For us who are surrounded by material comforts ac cumulated over hundreds of thousands of years, it is difficult to believe that iron was first utilized by man only about four thousand years ago, or that the art of writing and its vast social import, the plough and efficient