30 HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN 



in lucid intervals between other more immediately pressing researches, I 

 have been directly or indirectly studying human evolution, individual, 

 racial and creative, since the year 1880. 



Within the present year, however, my thoughts have been forced to take 

 an entirely new trend, namely, the bearing upon human evolution and 

 human progress of the present wholly unanticipated conditions of human 

 life and environment subsequent to the world war. I am deeply impressed 

 with the practical unity of all world problems— sociological, economic, 

 educational and religious. My world tour began in the Polynesian and 

 Melanesian islands, where certain isolated communities are to be found 

 still untouched or unmarred by civilization, with all primitive human 

 activities still in force among the once superb and self-sufficient races of the 

 South Sea and Cannibal Islands, such as Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea. 



The pristine isolation which enabled every country to pursue its own 

 evolution independently of all other countries, in Japan before Perry's 

 advent, in Korea before Japan's conquest, an isolation still so sharply 

 exemplified in the greater part of China, is all a condition of the past now 

 submerged or even banished by commercial invasion, by military conquest, 

 by the far more potent forces of modern inventions which unify once remote 

 and isolated countries and bring them, whether they will or no, within the 

 barbaric or civilizing influences of the entire modern world. 



In Java I first perceived the disturbing influence of the introduction of 

 machinery and mass production on the old uncivilized economic order. 

 While checked by introduced diseases in the South Sea Islands, the Javanese 

 population is mounting with alarming rapidity, having jumped from 12,000,- 

 000 to 40,000,000 in an incredibly short space of time, a naturally fertile 

 race being protected from disease and multiplying under their original mat- 

 ing customs. But even in these countries, relatively immune from the 

 dangers of civilization, we begin to observe the initial effects of world 

 interaction. 



The outstanding generalizations of my world tour are what may be 

 summed up as the "six overs"; these "six overs" are, in the genetic order of 

 cause and effect : 



Over-destruction of natural resources, now actually world-wide; 



Over-mechanization, in the substitution of the machine for animal and human labor, 

 rapidly becoming world-wide; 



Over-construction of warehouses, ships, railroads, wharves and other means of trans- 

 port, replacing primitive transportation; 



Over-production both of the food and of the mechanical wants of mankind, chiefly 

 during the post-war speculative period; 



