12 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 60 



proprioceptive sensations— come to have too large a share in con- 

 sciousness in comparison with exteroceptive. In place of considering 

 the lilies how they grow, or musing on the beauty and motions of 

 the heavenly bodies, the sedentary worker in the smoke-befouled 

 atmosphere with the limited activity and horizon of an office and a 

 disturbed digestion, tends to become confined to the inward con- 

 sideration of his own viscera and their motions. 



Many of the educated daughters of the well-to-do are no less con- 

 fined at home ; they are the flotsam and jetsam cast up from the tide 

 in which all others struggle for existence — their lives are no less 

 monotonous than those of the sweated seamstress or clerk. They be- 

 come filled with " vapors " and some seek excitement not in the can- 

 non's mouth, but in breaking windows, playing with fire, and hunger 

 strikes. The dull monotony of idle social functions, shopping, and 

 amusement, equally with that of sedentary work and an asexual 

 life, impels them to a simulated struggle — a theatrical performance, 

 the parts of which are studied from the historical romances of revo- 

 lution. 



Each man, woman, and child in the world must find the where- 

 withal for living, food, raiment, warmth, and housing, or must die 

 or get some other to find it for him. It seems to us as if the world 

 is conducted as if ten men were on an island — a microcosm — and five 

 sought for the necessaries of life, hunted for food, built shelters and 

 fires, and made clothes of skins, while the other five strung necklaces 

 of shells, made loin cloths of butterfly wings, gambled with knuckle 

 bones, drew comic pictures in the sand, or carved out of clay 

 frightening demons, and so beguiled from the first five the larger 

 share of their wealth. In this land of factories, while the many are 

 confined to mean streets and wretched houses, possessing no suffi- 

 ciency of baths and clean clothing, and are ill-fed, they work all day 

 long, not to fashion for themselves better houses and clothing, but to 

 make those unnecessaries such as " the fluff " of women's apparel, 

 and a thousand trifles which relieve the monotony of the idle and 

 bemuse their own minds. 



The discovery of radium and its disintegration as a source of 

 energy has enabled the physicist to extend Lord Kelvin's estimate 

 of the world's age from some thirty to a thousand million years. Ar- 

 thur Keith does not hesitate to give a million o£ these years to man's 

 evolution. Karl Pearson speaks of hundreds of thousands of years. 

 The form of the human skull, the brain capacity of man, his skill as 

 evidenced by stone implements and cave drawings of animals in 



