EVOLUTION 249 



land and sea, together with arts and industry, and the development of 

 social classes. It permitted war, conquest and slavery. Still, the great mass 

 of the people, the farmers ox peasants, lived an out-door life not greatly 

 different from that of the earliest hunters. 



The second change, a revolutionary one, the greatest of all in man's 

 environment, began some five hundred years ago. We find ourselves today 

 in the very rush of it. Our age has been called, not wholly accurately, the 

 age of science; the age of technology would be the better term. Technology 

 has been slowly growing, as a process of trial and error, from the very 

 earliest times. The pyramid builders in 3000 b. c. had a high degree of 

 technical skill. Man has not been so stupid that he has not been able through 

 the centuries to improve the old ways, to find both new things to do and 

 new ways of doing them. Invention, quite apart from scientific research, 

 has made great advances in the last two centuries. Mere enumeration is 

 all that is necessary: iron and steel, fuels (coal and oil) for power, trans- 

 portation, the factory, mass production; all this culminating in crowded 

 peoples and overgrown cities. For a while industry and new-born the- 

 oretical science followed separate paths. There was nothing in the early 

 experiments in electricity to suggest the gigantic electrical developments 

 of to-day. Science was largely the experimenting of individuals working 

 alone. Slowly it became clear that science could be of use in human affairs. 

 It was first pity, then endure, then embrace. Governments began to see 

 the advantages of subsidizing geological, agricultural and medical re- 

 search. To-day most large industrial corporations support their own re- 

 search staffs. Science and big business have entered into partnership, and 

 technology advances by leaps and bounds. It is reported that $235,000,000 

 were set aside by industry for scientific research in the United States in 

 one depression year. Whether in the end this union of business and science 

 will be for the world's good, it is too early to say. It has made possible mass 

 production and the modern city. Following, as it has, the discovery of new 

 continents, it has led to commercial rivalry, the exploitation of weaker 

 peoples, the demand for new markets and new sources of raw materials, 

 race antagonisms and world wars. 



It goes without saying that man himself has produced this new environ- 

 ment. Nature with no help from man shaped the environment in which he 

 acquired his mind and body. But to a large degree he has taken over from 

 Nature the building of his environment, has already tremendously changed 

 it, with what results we are beginning to see. Fle must no\\^ \\ork out his 

 destiny in a world amazingly different from that of any epoch of the past. 



This change to a technological environment is inevitably accompanied 

 by maladjustments which reach into every aspect of life. The dwellings 

 in which we live, whether the tenements and shacks of the poor or the 

 air-conditioned apartments of the well-to-do, are a sharp contrast to the 

 open-air life of man's formative period. The specialized and monotonous 



