Primitive man was probably more concerned with fire as a source of warmth and as a means of cooking food than as a source of light. Before the discovered less laborious ways of making fire, he had to preserve it and whenever he went on a journey he carried a firebrand with him. He discovered that the firebrand, from which the torch may well have developed, could be used for illumination was probably incidental to the primary purpose of preserving a flame.
Lamps too probably developed by accident. Early man may had his first conception of a lamp while watching a twing or fibre burning in the molten fat dropped from roasting carcass. All he had to do was to fashion a vessel to contain fat and float a lighted reed in it. Such lamps which were made of hollow stones or sea-shells have persisted in identical form up to quite recent times.

So far I have been speaking of science in its universality, viewed from the perspective of the world at large. For the context of our own country and our sister developing countries, many of the factors mentioned earlier are not very important. For example, pollution, deterioration of the environment and population explosion are not yet serious problems for us in this country.
Let me now turn to a more specific area, namely the question of scientific choice for developing countries. There is no doubt that role which science s and technology have played in the upliftment of the material and economic well-being of the developed nation will, and does, influence the criteria that the Third World nations must choose in order to establish their science policies and priorities.
But the criteria to be used by this nation do not have the same as those which have brought the developed countries to their present stage of evolution. For while human beings have the same problems, their solutions, to be meaningful will have to be sought within some relevant frame of reference, such as the available resources and expertise, social values, place and time in the historical scale.