642 INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT UPON HUMAN INDUSTRIES. 



race to occupy more than one was to become more and more artificial 

 and to multiply its wants. 



SPECIAL ENVIRONMENTS. 



In this connection, it will be profitable to note how the cosmic forces 

 have cooperated to create special environmental relationships in the 

 three kingdoms of nature. The arts of mankind have to do with the 

 mineral, vegetal, and animal resources of the earth, to procure them, 

 to manufacture them, to transport them, to count, weigh, measure, and 

 value them, to exchange them, and to enjoy them, in answer to an ever- 

 increasing body of wants, working them as materials by means of tools 

 and machinery, according to methods which constitute the processes of 

 the arts, always with definite ends in view. 



Now, these three kingdoms of nature, though they may have no king 

 apparent to our senses, are far from being for our race a purposeless 

 rabble. As with the three spheres of the earth, they also play into 

 one another indefinitely under the sway of the imperial sun. This 

 relationship has been represented as in the diagram (see plate). 



In the case of the spheres, it was easy to see that if the earth were 

 perfectly homogeneous and smooth the movements of air and water 

 would be tolerably uniform; but as things are arranged this would not 

 be so with our three kingdoms. There would be tropical, temperate, 

 and arctic plants and animals even then. But with the present order 

 of contours and movements in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geo- 

 sphere, the kingdoms of minerals, vegetables, and animals undergo an 

 endless variety of changes, creating no end of subvarieties in the 

 environments and stimuli to action and artificial life. 



The mineral kingdom is awakened by the sun; not only its mechanical 

 movements are quickened in the air, the water, and the earth, the cur- 

 rents of the ocean, the rains, snows, ice, frost, and heat, but somehow his 

 beams are entangled with life itself, for only in his presence are the 

 fields and forests clad in emerald, the organs of regeneration made 

 resplendent in flowers of every possible hue, and new beings come into 

 life at his bidding. It is only in the unfathomable abysses and in the 

 unillumined earth that life is not. The stream of life flows into the veg- 

 etal kingdom through the mineral, and a return current brings liberated 

 oxygen and the products of decay. The stream of life flows from the 

 vegetal into the mineral with return currents of carbonic acid gas, 

 decayed matter, and the preparation of the soil. The stream of life 

 descends from the animal to the mineral, with return currents in 

 the form of air to breathe, water to drink, and a host of mineral 

 substances wrought into our blood, brains, and bones. 1 The invisible 



1 Dr. C. Hart Merriam's studies in the relation of fauna to annual heat units is 

 interesting in this connection, since they really stand for the total solar force, 

 luminous, actinrc and heating. (Smithsonian Report, 1891, pp. 365-415.) 



