INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT UPON HUMAN INDUSTRIES

OR ARTS.'1

By OTIS TUFTON MASON.

THE ARTS OF LIFE.

My part in this programme is to speak to you upon the influence of environment upon human industries or arts.

By arts of life are meant all those activities which are performed by means of that large body of objects usually called apparatus, implements, tools, utensils, machines, or mechanical powers, in the utilization of force derived from the human body, from animals, and from natural agencies, such as gravity, wind, fire, steam, electricity, and the like.

There is a study of the activities of life that belongs to natural history, being concerned with what men are and what they do as mere nimals. They eat, drink, sleep, walk about, and help themselves to the bounties of nature, regardless of race. Their bones, muscles, and vital organs in their adult state, in their growth from embryo to decay, n their specific forms, are to be studied alongside of and in comparison with the same parts of other creatures. These natural activities of nankind constitute what, in old-time writers, was the natural as disinguished from the renewed man. In reality, all these natural endownents, along with other matters of which I am to speak, form part of he occasioning environment of arts and industries. But our concern now is with inventions, artificial implements, processes, and results. We have to study culture or the doings of the artificial man-the renewed man. All that he does through new devices constitutes his ndustries or his true industrial life. The higher any subspecies or ace or nation has climbed into this renewed life the greater has been ts culture.

THE ENVIRONMENT OF ARTS.

The environment of arts is really the sum total of all that is outside of and in touch with them, including the whole earth and all that on it well, the sun and the planets also, and many of the stars, since men

i Saturday lecture in Assembly Hall of United States National Museum, May 2, 1896.

guide their journeys by them, set their clocks and adjust their calendars according to their movements, and invent the most delicate apparatus to gaze upon them.

Practically, however, the environment of human arts is the combined action of the sun, the moon, and the earth, especially at any given place or in any culture center.

When you look at a terrestrial globe the first thing you notice is its smoothness and homogeneity. Now, if the earth were as smooth and homogeneous, that would end the matter. There would have been no arts, no lectures on their relation to environment, no audiences, and, to make a long story very short, no environment worth speaking about. If you were to look closely at a globe you would see that it is painted to represent a great variety of facts about the earth, to declare its physiographic outlines and features, its roughness and heterogeneity. To be precise, the earth consists of three inclosures-the land, the water, the air-enveloped in the all-pervading ether. The solid portion may be called the geosphere, the liquid portion the hydrosphere, the gaseous portion the atmosphere. These are not so many distinct things, like a nest of encapsulating boxes, but there exists the most intimate associ ations among them; they environ one another. The geosphere invades the waters and the air. Nowhere are the waters and the atmosphere free from the invasion of solid particles of matter. The hydrosphere invades the other two, rising into the atmosphere in enormous quantities, and sinking into the earth to unknown distances. Finally, the atmosphere is found permeating the waters, making life possible, and finding its way deep into the structure of the solid crust. The compo nents of the air and of the waters are also the chief ingredients in the structure of the solid portions. There is no element in the air nor in the waters that does not exist in another form in the earth's crust.

speak of this to impress upon your minds the fact that this mother planet of ours is not a mere pile of substances without interest in one another, but a very carefully organized body to do a certain kind of work. I shall not now stop to inquire whether it was intelligently planned to do this wonderful work, of which I shall soon speak, or whether the work is simply the result of its cooperative activities. It will suit my present purpose if I can get you to see with me this marvelous set of terrestrial cooperations.

THE SUN AND THE ENVIRONMENT.

The sun in its relation to the geosphere, the hydrosphere, and the atmosphere forms a part of the environmental cooperations. Our dis tance from the source of heat and light and actinism, our curve and velocity about it and the speed of diurnal revolution, the degree of inclination of the earth's axis of revolution to the plane of its annual path, and, finally, our journey with the sun through space are all a part of one scheme or congeries of natural phenomena out of which the

inutest phases of our industrial life spring. By a simple diagram ee plate) this action of the sun and interaction of earth strata may e shown. The ancients divided phenomena into those of earth, water, r, fire-not a bad division when we are considering the influence of vironment on human actions.

The terrestrial fires are responsible for the corrugations on the earth's rust. The solar fires, in cooperation with the moon and the earth's moons and its inclination in its orbit are responsible for the movements f the waters and the air in tides and climate and all the marvelous hanges included in that word. The waters of the earth preserve tolrably well the spheroidal form, and the winds and climates of the seas onform to the simple laws of spherical motion under given conditions. The lands projecting from the seas by their elevations and conformaions modify the movements of the air and the waters so as to re-create hemselves. The winds of the Atlantic, saturated with moisture, sliding westward as the earth spins eastward at the rate of a thousand miles an our, strike against the mountain barrier of the two Americas. Their waters are precipitated in deluges on the lowlands and blizzards of now on the high mountains. This provokes the action of disintegrat ng frosts, of avalanches, of glaciers, of torrents, of rank vegetation to reak down the mountains and form the continents eastward. On the contrary, west of this vast upheaval the winds from which the water has been wrung turn the western slopes almost to a desert.

The Eastern Hemisphere has other codes of behavior for the earth, he air, and the water. The results are the long slope toward the Arctic and a series of rivers whose mouths are stopped with ice at the moment when their higher channels are in the periods of inundation. The Russian and Siberian wastes are the result, and the long north sloping Piedmont from the North Sea to Lake Baikal.

These coordinating activities result in the rich rivers of China, the arden spot of Japan, the overwatered regions of southeastern Asia, he great desert region of central Asia, the varied climate of India, the xcessively complex arrangement of elevation, heat, precipitation, and water front about southern and western Europe. In Africa and the ndo-Pacific Archipelagos the phenomena also form part of a single cheme.

To the arts of man all mountains, all rivers, forests, prairies, and eserts are necessary,-the deep sea no less than those prolific feeding rounds into which early men ventured and learned their first lesson in elf-confidence, the end of which would come to be familiarity with the hole globe.

In fact, the whole world is now, and always has been, a single envionment for man, fitted up with more or less spacious environments which the first human groups settled, and as they became richer and tronger they took larger and larger apartments. Each one of these nvironments had a character of its own and the only possibility for a

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 everincreasing 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 geosphere, 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 vegetal 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.' The invisible

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, actinic and heating. sonian Report, 1891, pp. 365-415.)

FIG. 1. Chart showing how the sun, operating on the geosphere, the hydrosphere, and the atmosphere, makes of them a single environment for the whole human species. The air invades the earth and the waters; the waters invade the earth and the air; the earth invades the waters and the air. Their mutual activities depend upon the sun.

FIG. 2. Showing how the three kingdoms of nature are in their totalities under the rule of the sun and how their interdependencies are created by that luminary, the whole constituting a single environment of man.