Why are legends handed down by storytellers useful?
We can read of things that happened 5,000 years 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 storytellers 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 about 2,000 years 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.
How much of each year do spiders spend killing insects?
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 ditterence
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 than 2,250.000 in one
acre; that is something like 6,000.000 spiders 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 meals 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.
Several cases have been reported in Russia 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 Ulyanovsk,
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
1could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.