Lesson1
We can read of things that happened5,000years ago in the Near East,where people first learned to write.But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write.The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another.These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago,but none could write down what they did.Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from.The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about2,000years ago.
But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas,if they had any,are forgotten.So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first'modern men'came from.
Fortunately,however,ancient men made tools of stone,especially flint,because this is easier to shape than other kinds.They may also have used wood and skins,but these have rotted away.Stone does not decay,and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.
Lesson2
Why,you may wonder,should spiders be our friends?Because they destroy so many insects,and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race.Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world;they would devour all our crops and
kill our flocks and herds,if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals.We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders.Moreover,unlike some of the other insect eaters,spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings. Spiders are not insects,as many people think,nor even nearly related to them.One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six.
How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf?One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England,and he estimated that there were more than2,250,000in one acre,that is something like6,000,000spiders of different kinds on a football pitch.Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects.It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill,but they are hungry creatures,not content with only three me
als a day.It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.
Lesson3
Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport,and the more difficult it is,the more highly it is regarded.In the pioneering days,however, this was not the case at all.The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought,especially if it had never been attained before.It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangers
of the most perilous nature,equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought,but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim,a solitary goal--the top!
It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers.Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix,which had rapidly become popular,Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains.Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden;the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread often twelve
months old,all washed down with coarse wine.Often a valley boasted no inn at all,and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the local priest(who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or cheese-makers.Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty,and very uncomfortable.For men accustomed to eating seven-course dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home,the change to the Alps must have been very hard indeed.
Lesson4
In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers,and even see through solid doors and walls.One case concerns an'eleven-year-old schoolgirl,Vera Petrova,who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin,and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by her father.One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe.Suddenly she asked her father
why he kept so many old newspapers locked away there,and even described the way they were done up in bundles.
Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of UIyanovsk,near where she lives,and in April she was given a series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic.During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and,stranger still,by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it;and,in another instance,wearing stockings and slippers,to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet.Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold;and,indeed,except when blindfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin.It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.
Lesson5shudder
The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene.One thinks one knows him very well.For a hundred years or more he has been killed,captured,and imprisoned,in zoos.His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere,and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike.He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books,and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific)link
with our ancestral past.
Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas.No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state,no zoologist,however intrepid,has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which he lives.Carl Akeley,the American naturalist,led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals he
loved so well.But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives,or how or why it dies,nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups,or indicate the final extent of their intelligence.All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago.The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.
Lesson6
People are always talking about'the problem of youth'.If there is one—which I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it,not the young themselves.Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings--people just like their elders.There is only one differe
nce between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him:and maybe that is where the rub is.
When I was a teenager,I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school,and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so

版权声明：本站内容均来自互联网，仅供演示用，请勿用于商业和其他非法用途。如果侵犯了您的权益请与我们联系QQ:729038198，我们将在24小时内删除。