644 INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT UPON HUMAN INDUSTRIES. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF ENVIRONMENT, 



We may now be allowed to enumerate some of those characteristics 

 of this composite nature of things whose influence upon our daily 

 activities we are now contemplating. And first we can not help seeing 

 that the environment is the provider of all raw materials. This seems 

 trite, and in its simple statement may be so. But see how each people 

 of the earth is characterized by its raw materials. An Eskimo collec- 

 tion is white; the same ideas are expressed by the Haidas south of 

 them in jet black. The art of the British Columbian is red, of Oregon 

 and California yellow, of the Pueblos ecru, of Mexico gray. All this 

 is plain enough when you know the color of walrus ivory, of slate, and 

 mountain goat horn, of cedar, of grasses and spruce root, of fire clay 

 when baked, and of volcanic building stones. People express them- 

 selves in the material at hand. The Egyptian was furnished with lime- 

 stone and syenite, so he hammered away at that. His ideas could 

 mount no higher than the material. On the other hand, the Greek was 

 provided by environment with the whitest, finest, and thickest quar- 

 ries of marble on earth. It was expected of him that he should give 

 the highest expression of the aesthetic faculty in sculpture and archi- 

 tecture, though his pottery was somewhat inferior. When the whole 

 world is brought into one environment by the art of transportation, 

 then other lands have hope to imbibe some of the genius engendered 

 and fostered about the quarries of Pentelicus. But in the generative 

 period of industrial forms, before the world-embracing commerce, it 

 was not so. 



Nature or environment appears to us, secondly, in the light of a pur- 

 veyor of force. At first our race had only the force of its own frail 

 but versatile bodies to depend upon, yet men will never cease to marvel 

 at this mechanism as an economic device for storing and utilizing 

 power. Whether we regard a machine in the light of saving fuel, 

 of speed, of ability to change rectilinear motion readily into that of 

 any curve or succession of curves, the body of man will ever remain 

 for inventors to wonder at and imitate. Long ago backs and hands 

 and feet were wearied with ever-increasing burdens, and so the dog, 

 the reindeer, the horse, the ass, the cow, the camel, the llama, the ele- 

 phant, and even the sheep were handed over in innumerable packs and 

 herds to give additional power to industry. These creatures not only 

 fed and clothed men, they made men's legs longer, their backs stronger, 

 their hands more skillful. Then came the wind to blow upon the mat, 

 the sail, the mill, and the water, moving in its natural currents and 

 then iu artificial channels to turn the wheels of industrialism. How 

 bountiful has nature been in the supply of force! Who ever dreamed 

 of exhausting it? How many ships upon the sea would it take to use 

 up all the winds that blow, and how many turbine wheels would it 



