474 ZOOLOGY 



These attainments have required thousands of years to 

 build. Adjustment to these gains has not become instinctive. 

 Education must supplement and guide the impulses of every 

 new individual. It is the triumph of human education that so 

 much can be imparted in so short a time. 



473. Man's Relation to Nature. — There is nothing in what 

 we can learn about man that suggests that he is not just as 

 dependent on the natural laws of his own being and of the en- 

 vironment about him as any other animal in the animal kingdom. 

 He starts in the same humble way, as a single cell; he has the 

 same powers of growth and development, but he must have con- 

 ditions favorable to them. To-day is always the child of yester- 

 day, just as with the other anima,ls. He has the like diseases; 

 he is affected with similar parasites; he has enemies among 

 the animals just as is true of the others. Equally, he depends 

 on them for his food. The same struggle for existence and the 

 survival of the fittest that we find in all of life can be traced in 

 much of human history. 



Man, however, has made a mastery of nature which no other 

 forms have been able, to do. Probably through his wits and 

 his supple hands, rather than by strength, he held his own 

 against the powerful mammals which preceded him on the 

 earth. By the same means, but in increasing degree he holds 

 that mastery to-day. Through his wits, again, and his wonder- 

 ful hands he has managed to use the inorgariic forces of nature 

 as no other animal has done or can do. Through his wits, and 

 most of all through his growing sympathies and unselfishness, he 

 bids fair to build up a society, based on friendship and love, 

 which will substitute cooperation for competitions in the broader 

 relations of life just as it has already done in the home itself. 

 Only by advance in this direction can we hope to have a 

 civilization which is entitled to be called humane. 



474. The Artificial Surroundings of Man. — In what we call 

 civilization man has so controlled the natural conditions as to 

 create for himself an environment which is greatly different 

 from that under which man first lived. Clothes, houses, cities, 



