THE HUMAN BEAST OF BURDEN, 



By Otis T. Mason. 



I never see a great passenger or express train approaching a station 

 without thinking of the long and tiresome experiences through which 

 the human mind has passed upward to this concrete climax of inven- 

 tions. 



I take my stand as near as safety will allow, that I may drink in the 

 eddies of the boiling atmosphere with the aroma of civilization which 

 it represents. 



There is something wonderful in the iron horse — his glaring head- 

 light, irresistible momentum, extreme docility. On the platform of the 

 locomotive stands the controlling mind, the engineer, one hand upon a 

 lever, which sets in motion all this ponderous mass at the rate of even 

 a mile a minute, as Cicero says, u quadam inclinatione corporis." His 

 other hand rests upon the air-brake, by means of which he controls the 

 momentum of 500 tons, reducing it at will to absolute rest. Who has 

 not imagined, as he whirled along on one of these trains, that he could 

 hear the measured hoof-beats of this horse of progress striking the ties 

 or the iron rails'? If we consider all the industries and motives involved 

 in this man's activity, the myriad trades and occupations invoked in 

 the manufacture of train and track, the multitudinous avocations ac- 

 commodated by and stimulating his movements, the infinite variety of 

 freight, animate and inanimate 5 bags of letters, the messengers of 

 every want and emotion; an endless caravan of passengers of every class 

 of humanity on every possible errand, representing all commercial de- 

 signs, social and civil structures and functions, we shall have an example 

 of the climax of human endeavor in its most highly organized condition 

 relative to a long series of inventions, of which this is only the intro- 

 ductory chapter. Besides these there are thousands of other occupations, 

 in which carrying is neither directly nor remotely interested, wherein 

 man's handiwork has preceded, initiated, and kept up the higher utili- 

 zation of animals and of natural forces. 



But we are not concerned at the present moment so much with the 

 tedious and varied manipulations by which the railway train has been 

 manufactured from the forest and the mine (that would be its ontogeny) 

 as with the millenniums of change through which a common human 



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