INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT UPON HUMAN INDUSTRIES 



OR ARTS. 1 



By Otis Tufton Mason. 



THE ARTS OF LIFE. 



My part in this programme is to speak to you upon the influence of 

 environment upon human industries or arts. 



By arts of life are meant all those activities which are performed by 

 means of that large body of objects usually called apparatus, imple- 

 ments, tools, utensils, machines, or mechanical powers, in the utiliza- 

 tion of force derived from the human body, from animals, and from 

 natural agencies, such as gravity, wind, fire, steam, electricity, and the 

 like. 



There is a study of the activities of life that belongs to natural his- 

 tory, being concerned with what men are and what they do as mere 

 animals. They eat, drink, sleep, walk about, and help themselves to 

 the bounties of nature, regardless of race. Their bones, muscles, and 

 vital organs in their adult state, in their growth from embryo to decay, 

 in their specific forms, are to be studied alongside of and in comparison 

 with the same parts of other creatures. These natural activities of 

 mankind constitute what, in old-time writers, was the natural as dis- 

 tinguished from the renewed man. In reality, all these natural endow- 

 ments, along with other matters of which I am to speak, form part of 

 the occasioning environment of arts and industries. But our concern 

 now is with inventions, artificial implements, processes, and results. 

 We have to study culture or the doings of the artificial man — the 

 renewed man. All that he does through new devices constitutes his 

 industries or his true industrial life. The higher any subspecies or 

 race or nation has climbed into this renewed life the greater has been 

 its culture. 



THE ENVIRONMENT OF ARTS. 



The environment of arts is really the sum total of all that is outside 

 of and in touch with them, including the whole earth and all that on it 

 dwell, the sun and the planets also, and many of the stars, since men 



1 Saturday lecture iu Assembly Hall of United States National Museum, May 2, 1896. 



639 



