It is a long time between the day of the cave-dwellers, with their
instruments of chipped stone, and the present day of the pen. Yet wide
apart as are these points of time, the trend of development can with
but few obstacles be traced.
The story of the pen is a natural sequence of ideas between the first
piece of rock scratched upon rock by prehistoric man, and the bit of
metal which now so smoothly records our thoughts.
There was a time in the unwritten history of man when necessity
prompted the invention of weapons, and the minds of these primitive men
were concentrated upon this point. But the arts of war did not take up
their entire time; some time must have been given to other pursuits.
As the mind developed, and as an aid to memory, we find them carving,
engraving, incising upon the rocks their hieroglyphics, which took the
form of figures of men, habitations, weapons, and the animals of their
period.
[Illustration: THE STYLUS]
How Did Writing First Come About?
An apparently difficult question to answer, since without writing there
can be no record of its origin, and without records no facts; yet the
deduction is so clear that the answer is simple. Somewhere far, far
back in the dawn of the world, back in the beginning of human history,
in the epoch which we have now named the Quaternary Period, man lived
in a dense wilderness surrounded by the wildest and most ferocious
beasts. His home was a cave, exposed to the dangers incidental to that
time and his surroundings, and he was of necessity compelled to look
about for means of defense. With this idea in mind, he found that by
striking one stone against another he knocked off chips, which chips
could be used as arrow-heads, spears and axes. Following along these
lines he discovered that by rubbing one of these chips against another
there was left a mark, which was the first imitation of writing; that
the sharper the edge of the chip, the deeper was the scratch, and
consequently the more distinct the mark.
[Illustration: EARLIEST WAYS OF WRITING