Proenvironment in the Evolution of Man 633 



The history of the automobile is so recent and so well known 

 tnat mention of its proenvironal evolution will suffice. But 

 in passing one may well ask, what could even the most men- 

 tally accomplished man have achieved for it, or for the bi- 

 cycle, had not the brain been constantly stimulated by me- 

 chanotactic and heliotactic stimuli sent to it from the hand 

 and the eye, had not these been united into resultants that 

 so acted by pencil, paper, and rubber as to start compounded 

 resultants in which metals, woods, leathers, cloths, oils, and 

 other substances were proenvironally dealt with as if each 

 were a material fact that stood out before the operator's eye. 

 The heliotactically acting eye guided the hand, which in all 

 of the above varied efforts was the organ that continuously 

 brought the brain into closest environal contact with those 

 environal objects that had to be molded, fitted, adjusted, 

 and started into final action. Then resulted such humanly 

 devised or "proenvironed organisms," as we may well call 

 them, that in their harmonious working and varied construc- 

 tion quite rival complicated animal or plant organisms. So 

 the remarkable proenvironal advances made by man during 

 the past century have been due to cooperative activity of 

 the ocular or heliotactic sense, the hand or mechanotactic 

 sense, as well as others of less prominent kind, and the brain 

 as a sensitively receptive, correlating, and originating center 

 for new resultant stimuli. All of this also has proceeded on 

 the physical principle of action and reaction. 



But a valuable application of the law of proenvironal evolu- 

 tionary advance in man's history can be made to the problem 

 of species and genus evolution amongst animals and plants. 

 In previous chapters we have discussed "the factors of organic 

 evolution" that have originated species, genera, and famiHes 

 in succession. But with man every proenvironal and then 

 realized instrument is a genus, of which he continues to evolve 

 species and varieties. Thus at the present day we can truly 

 and exactly say that the cart, the wagon, the horse-carriage, 

 the tricycle, the bicycle, the autocycle, and automobile form 

 collectively a ''conveyance" family, that might well be termed 



