INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT UPON HUMAN INDUSTRIES. G45 



require to take up and transform into useful arts the force of all water- 

 falls? 



It is true there are environmental gifts that may be ruthlessly 

 wasted. As Professor McGee has shown, the resources of fertility 

 wasted in the United States every year exceed those reproduced in 

 crops. Six hundred million tons of coal are the output annually in the 

 United States. Many species of most useful animals have been irre- 

 trievably extinguished, but who ever thought of exhausting gravity, 

 elasticity, the mechanical jiowers, the forces of the environment. How- 

 ever, we must admit that even these natural forces are unequally dis- 

 tributed, and that gives character also to the arts. There are no 

 turbine wheels in the desert, no sails cross the zone of calms, and each 

 domestic animal has its geographic range beyond which it becomes 

 unprofitable. 



In the third place, the environment manifests itself as the teacher of 

 industries. I should be the last person in the world to rob the ingen- 

 ious mind of man of its glory in achievements through human industry; 

 but the fact remains that wherever you enter his workshop, called the 

 world, you will see hanging on the walls and lying about him all sorts 

 of patterns and models, and a multitude of processes are going on 

 which he falls into as "heir of all the ages." 



There were cave dwellers before there were men ; spiders, mud wasps, 

 beavers, and birds spun and worked in clay and cut down trees and 

 made soft beds for their young long ago. Plants reared vessels and mol- 

 lusks produced dishes that even now are the patterns of the most 

 skillful potters. There were hammers, gimlets, pins, needles, saws, 

 baskets, and sandpaper at haud when the human artisan first became 

 an apprentice. And I would ask you whether there is any possibility 

 of this suggestiveness of nature ever being exhausted. Whisperings 

 are yet going on in her school. The little birds have not told all the 

 secrets. The processions toward the patent office prove that the grow- 

 ing coordinations of environment in relation to the common industries 

 have turned the village school, with its circumscribed advantages, into 

 a world-embracing university. 



Lastly, I must not fail to tell you that the environment itself is capa- 

 ble of unlimited education and improvement in relation to the com- 

 monest wants of life and our ways of satisfying them. There is one 

 thought about the nature of the common things among which we min- 

 gle that fills me with ever-increasing delight. It is the sympathetic 

 response of nature or environment to every affectionate touch. An 

 industrious and wise farmer settles upon a piece of land. Soon you 

 behold remunerative crops replacing the forest and the waste. The 

 man is enriched; he then enriches the laud, and by a kind of mutual 

 admiration they two grow fat together. When a progressive race 

 has settled down in a part of the earth not too icy, not too torrid, not 



