662 INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT UPON HUMAN INDUSTRIES. 

 THE COMPREHENSIVE ENVIRONMENT. 



In closing, I desire to call your special attention to the ever increas- 

 ing size and variety and comprehensiveness of the term environment 

 as culture has advanced. At first, in what may be called the centrifu- 

 gal condition of human evolution, the execution of limited environments 

 went hand in hand with the production of races and varieties of peo- 

 ples and languages and typical groups of industries. The overstepping 

 of the boundaries of these in the course of time produced many 

 changes of the profoundest significance in men and their activities. 



First. The increase of knowledge was accompanied with the refine- 

 ment, the intensifying, and the multiplication of desires and the means 

 of gratifying them. 



Second. These demanded longer journeys and the perfection of 

 machinery; changes in commerce and the ministers of enjoyment. 



Third. They demanded modification and increase of cooperative 

 forces, of language, of law, of knowledge and intelligence. 



Fourth. Growing by what it fed upon, these irresistible tendencies 

 seized the whole earth, and henceforth it was one oikoumene, one 

 enclave, one environment. 



ENVIRONMENT THE OCCASION NOT THE CAUSE OF INDUSTRIES. 



From one point of view it would appear that all mankind and all arts 

 are the outright product of this cunning environment. But a sober 

 view, while it gives to the latter all deserved encomium beholds in the 

 ingenious human creature the true source of all arts. I do not know 

 a better proof of this than the fact that the withholding or the conceal- 

 ing of gifts by nature acts as a stimulus to iugenuity. Take, for exam- 

 ple, the bow. There are regions where the wood for this implement is 

 perfect, as in South America, or the hard- wood forests of Eastern 

 United States. Here the very embarrassment of riches lead men to be 

 satisfied with a very poorly made bow. 



jSTow, the characteristics of a good bow are rigidity and elasticity. 

 When our ingenious friend, the Indian, climbed the eastern slopes of the 

 Eocky Mountains, away from the hard -wood forests, he invoked the mam- 

 mals to yield the sinew from the leg or the scapula and with this he 

 glues an elastic back upon his poor implement, or unites two or three 

 horns so as to get his effect, the middle piece giving the columnar resis- 

 tance, the wings putting to flight the arrow. By and by you approach 

 the Hyperborean man, you ask him how he is going to have a bow. 

 He tells you that he is in the current of progressive culture whose law 

 is "the poorer the environment the greater the ingenuity." It is true 

 that he has only brittle driftwood, that glue will not hold in his cold 

 and damp clime, and that materials for arrows are scarce. The result 

 of this is the sinew-backed bow and the harpoon arrow, together the 

 most complicated and ingenious device ever contrived by savage mind. 



