The first cook. It took a long time, however, to learn how to use this gift. For centuries men lived like wild animals. Their food consisted of nuts, herbs, fruit, and the flesh of animals. Cooking was unknown, and when a wild animal was captured, the savage tore it apart and ate the raw flesh. According to one legend, a hunter, after a long tramp, succeeded in catching a rabbit. On his way home he found a smoldering fire which had been started by lightning. Throwing his rabbit on a log, he lay down and went to sleep. When he awoke, he found that his rabbit had fallen into the fire. In attempting to rescue it, the savage got some of the juice of the roasted rabbit on his fingers. By instinct, he put his burnt fingers to his mouth, and the taste was so pleasing that he immediately finished the rabbit, and this is how man learned to cook.
Reduction of metals. Ages later, man began to use fire to make metals and to form them into spears and hatchets for hunting and fighting. The alchemists, as we know, used fire in their attempts to change the base metals into gold, and today fires are burning in many furnaces producing, if not gold, metals of far greater value to the progress of civilization. Copper, bronze, iron, and steel, produced by fire, have been the stepping stones of mans progress through the ages. The chemistry involved in the extraction, purification, and alloying of metals is so interesting and of such great importance that volumes have been written on this subject.
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