640 INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT UPON HUMAN INDUSTRIES. 



guide their journeys by them, set their clocks and adjust their cal- 

 endars according to their movements, and invent the most delicate 

 apparatus to gaze upon them. 



Practically, however, the environment of human arts is the combined 

 action of the sun, the moon, and the earth, especially at any given 

 place or in any culture center. 



When you look at a terrestrial globe the first thing you notice is 

 its smoothness and homogeneity. Now, if the earth were as smooth and 

 homogeneous, that would end the matter. There would have been no 

 arts, no lectures on their relation to environment, no audiences, and, to 

 make a long story very short, no environment worth speaking about. 

 If you were to look closely at a globe you would see that it is painted to 

 represent a great variety of facts about the earth, to declare its physi- 

 ographic outlines and features, its roughness and heterogeneity. To 

 be precise, the earth consists of three inclosures — the laud, the water, 

 the air — enveloped in the all-pervading ether. The solid portion may be 

 called the geosphere, the liquid portion the hydrosphere, the gaseous 

 portion the atmosphere. These are not so many distinct things, like a 

 nest of encapsulating boxes, but there exists the most intimate associ- 

 ations among them; they environ one another. The geosphere invades 

 the waters and the air. Nowhere are the waters and the atmosphere 

 free from the invasion of solid particles of matter. The hydrosphere 

 invades the other two, rising into the atmosphere in enormous quanti- 

 ties, and sinking into the earth to unknown distances. Finally, the 

 atmosphere is found permeating the waters, making life possible, and 

 finding its way deep into the structure of the solid crust. The compo- 

 nents of the air and of the waters are also the chief ingredients in the 

 structure of the solid portions. There is no element in the air nor in 

 the waters that does not exist in another form in the earth's crust. 



I speak of this to impress upon your minds the fact that this mother 

 planet of ours is not a mere pile of substances without interest in one 

 another, but a very carefully organized body to do a certain kind of 

 work. I shall not now stop to inquire whether it was intelligently 

 planned to do this wonderful work, of which I shall soon speak, or 

 whether the work is simply the result of its cooperative activities. It 

 will suit my present purpose if I can get you to see with me this mar- 

 velous set of terrestrial cooperations. 



THE SUN AND THE ENVIRONMENT. 



The sun in its relation to the geosphere, the hydrosphere, and the 

 atmosphere forms a part of the environmental cooperations. Our dis- 

 tance from the source of heat and light and actinism, our curve and 

 velocity about it and the speed of diurnal revolution, the degree of 

 inclination of the earth's axis of revolution to the plane of its annual 

 path, and, finally, our journey Avith the sun through space are all a part 

 of one scheme or congeries of natural phenomena out of which the 



