250 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



work of the miner or factory hand is slavery compared with that of the 

 early hunter, which, if strenuous at times, lacked neither variety nor in- 

 terest, and was a real education. The deep-canyon streets of the city, filled 

 with noise, gas, dirt and rush, or the drab surroundings of the factory 

 town, are a sorry alternative to the open country. Two views of lower 

 Manhattan, taken more than three centuries apart, would symbolize the 

 change. One, to-day, would show the wonderful sky-Hne of high build- 

 ings, the other the wooded island Hudson saw when he entered the upper 

 bay in 1609. 



The human element in the environment has changed no less than the 

 material. The pace of modern life and the intellectual level on which it 

 is carried on, make demands beyond any that were made on early men, 

 demands which many can not meet. Modern industry finds many unem- 

 ployable persons. It requires more from those it takes on, and scraps those 

 it can not use with the same lack of consideration with which it scraps 

 outworn machinery. It imitates Nature in her harsher moods. 



The results? Before the war, between five and ten million unemployed 

 in the United States, facing the choice between public support, starvation 

 or crime; worse, unemployables; poverty, economic insecurity and recur- 

 rent depressions. Clearly the economic system is not working satisfac- 

 torily. Sickness; the medical bill of the United States is some three billion 

 a year, and large numbers get no medical care. Defectives and insane; 

 mental cases in hospitals rose from 63.7 per 100,000 in 1880 to 263.6 in 

 1934. The total annual cost of crime, direct and indirect, in our country 

 runs into the billions. This tremendous load; unemployment, including 

 the idle rich, crime, sickness, waste, class struggle, and worst insanity of 

 all, war; all this is loaded on the backs of the actual workers on farm, in 

 factory and office. This is the "white man's burden," not his egotistically 

 assumed overlordship of races of another color. 



What of the future? Physical conditions alone considered, there is 

 every reason to believe that the earth will be a suitable home for men 

 for a long time to come. There is nothing in the geological past to suggest 

 any speedy wind-up of mundane affairs. If some wandering star ap- 

 proaches our sun and upsets things, or if the sun blows up, as suns (novae) 

 have been known to do, or if in the far distant future our central sun be- 

 comes cold, that will end us. But such contingencies are almost infinitely 

 remote, and the scientist, as a student of earth's history, is justified in ignor- 

 ing them. 



Chmatic conditions will continue to be favorable. When the extent of 

 the continental glaciers of the northern hemisphere was first appreciated, 

 it seemed as if the earth might be cooling down; that we were about to 

 enter upon a long period of refrigeration, in which human life would be- 



