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necessity, in their demands on the industry of man. Arts and Sciences 
sprang into existence in proportion with the improvement of the social 
system, and its advancement from rudeness to order and beauty. The me¬ 
chanic and the architect, the sculptor and the painter, were found in their 
several vocati< ns, but no longer as mere tillers of the soil; the multipli¬ 
city of wants required by society, caused a division of labor, and a 
classification of the industrial hives from the cultivator of the ground, 
the producer of the indispensible, the support of human life, up through 
every branch of the mechanical arts, and the liberal sciences, to the mere 
student and lover of literature. Most valuable and honored in this clas¬ 
sification appears the subduer of the soil. 
The teeming mother of ull wealth is the earth; all the absolute neces¬ 
saries of life; all the luxuries that a refined state of society may demand 
in decorating the person or the property of man, spring from, or are 
nourished by, the earth. From the trees of the forest has been fashion¬ 
ed as well the rude wooden dibble by which man first broke the soil, to 
enable him to raise an esculent or a grain, as the highly improved plow 
and cultivator of the present day. From the forest came the material 
from which man contrived a primitive bench and a rough table; the same 
material now furnishes us the most splendid specimens of the mechanic’s 
and the sculptor’s art. From the rough cabin of unhewed timber to the 
splendid palace; from the hollowed log canoe to the majestic ship of com¬ 
merce, from the plainest wooden trencher, or other necessary utensil, to 
the most elaborate specimen of the carver’s taste, and the cabinet maker’s 
ingenuity earth produces, and man the artificer improves. 
Let us view this mother of wealth in another aspect; man may cease for 
a moment to till the earth for his daily sustenance ; the division of labor 
has caused this lot to be cast upon other working conscripts; but man still 
explores his mother earth, and she produces to him, and for his use, the 
all-necessary and useful, as well as the precious and ornamental metals. 
From the bowels of the earth man digs and produces the ore, whose 
manufacture enables him to subdue the forest to his handiwork, to con¬ 
struct his articles of necessity in all his pursuits in life, and his objects 
of luxury and refinement, by which that life is rendered more easy and 
agreeable. By this ore he is enabled to journey with the speed of the 
wind, to annihilate time and space in the communication of his thoughts. 
