Reading.
Get started

Library / Literature & Fiction

The Human Drift

by Jack London

Pages
about 115
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
2.1 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 70 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

"The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd Who rose before us, and as Prophets Burn'd, Are all but stories, which, awoke from Sleep, They told their comrades, and to Sleep return'd."

The history of civilisation is a history of wandering, sword in hand, in search of food. In the misty younger world we catch glimpses of phantom races, rising, slaying, finding food, building rude civilisations, decaying, falling under the swords of stronger hands, and passing utterly away. Man, like any other animal, has roved over the earth seeking what he might devour; and not romance and adventure, but the hunger-need, has urged him on his vast adventures. Whether a bankrupt gentleman sailing to colonise Virginia or a lean Cantonese contracting to labour on the sugar plantations of Hawaii, in each case, gentleman and coolie, it is a desperate attempt to get something to eat, to get more to eat than he can get at home.

It has always been so, from the time of the first pre-human anthropoid crossing a mountain-divide in quest of better berry-bushes beyond, down to the latest Slovak, arriving on our shores to-day, to go to work in the coal-mines of Pennsylvania. These migratory movements of peoples have been called drifts, and the word is apposite. Unplanned, blind, automatic, spurred on by the pain of hunger, man has literally drifted his way around the planet. There have been drifts in the past, innumerable and forgotten, and so remote that no records have been left, or composed of such low-typed humans or pre-humans that they made no scratchings on stone or bone and left no monuments to show that they had been.

These early drifts we conjecture and know must have occurred, just as we know that the first upright-walking brutes were descended from some kin of the quadrumana through having developed "a pair of great toes out of two opposable thumbs."

A short sample. Read the whole book

More to read

Public-domain text from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks or a similar open source. Copyright differs between countries. Rights holder? See our takedown process.