THE CONQUEST OF NATURE 



dependent upon an achievement or an invention that 

 facilitated the carrying out of that scheme of never- 

 ending work which from first to last has been man's 

 portion. How to labor more efficiently, more produc- 

 tively; how to produce more of the necessaries and of 

 the luxuries that man's physical and mental being 

 demands, with less expenditure of toil that from first 

 to last has been the ever-insistent problem. And 

 the answer has been found always through the develop- 

 ment of some new species of mechanism, some new 

 labor-saving device, some ingenious manipulation of 

 the powers of Nature. 



If, turning from the hypothetical period of our 

 primitive ancestor, we consider the sweep of secure 

 and relatively recent history, we shall find that precisely 

 the same thing holds. If we contrast the civilization 

 of Old Egypt and Babylonia the oldest civilizations of 

 which we have any secure record with the civilization 

 of to-day, we shall find that the differences between 

 the one and the other are such as are due to new and 

 improved methods of accomplishing the world's work. 



Indeed, if we view the subject carefully, it will be- 

 come more and more evident that the only real progress 

 that the historic period has to show is such as has grown 

 directly from the development of new mechanical 

 inventions. The more we study the ancient civiliza- 

 tions the more we shall be struck with their marvelous 

 resemblance, as regards mental life, to the civilization 

 of to-day. In their moral and spiritual ideals, the 

 ancient Egyptians were as brothers to the modern 

 Europeans. In philosophy, in art, in literature, the 



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