268 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



We can grasp the magnitude and the significance of 

 this almost instant achievement of man only when we 

 realize that there had been no notable inventions or 

 consistent improvements in animal sense organs in many 

 millions of preceding years. 



4. The . New Ways and Means of Conveyance. 

 Broadly speaking, vital response is expressed in the 

 ways and means of conveyance: (i ) In organic acts, or 

 motion, such as movements of appendages, heart-beat, 

 peristaltic action, etc. ; in locomotion, or bodily trans- 

 portation in air, land, or water, or along definite roads, 

 or pathways in such media; and in circulation, or the 

 internal movements of vital commodities and waste 

 materials through definite channels, blood vessels, ca- 

 nals, and tubules. (2) In communication, or the trans- 

 mission of impulses through amorphous media, such as 

 air, or water, or soil; or through specially constructed 

 conductors, such as nerve fibres. (3) In the impulses 

 and commodities themselves, and in their conductors, 

 receptacles, records, and other architectural contain- 

 ers. (4) In the regulation of conveyance in response to 

 variations in supply and demand. 



Commerce, science, literature, and art, in a word, 

 culture, is merely an extension, or enlargement, of these 

 organic systems of conveyance, utilizing more power 

 and other instruments, and which at one and the same 

 time serve the same functions for many, that the vital 

 organs do for one. 



Man was the first animal to construct a cultural 

 system of this character. In the nineteenth century, its 

 great trunk lines of conveyance extended completely 

 round the earth, for the first time in evolution, defi- 



