for a hammer, or could pry up a stone with a stake, thus adding one
more lever to the levers that made up his arm. From that day to
this, the career of man has been that of a person who has operated
upon his environment in a different way from any animal before him.
An era of similar importance came probably somewhat later, when man
learned how to build a fire and cook his food; thus initiating that
course of culinary development of which we have seen the climax in
our dainty dinner this evening. Here was another means of acting
upon the environment. Here was the beginning of the working of
endless physical and chemical changes through the application of
heat, just as the first use of the club or the crowbar was the
beginning of an enormous development in the mechanical arts.

Now, at the same time, to go back once more into that dim past,
when ethics and religion, manual art and scientific thought, found
expression in the crudest form of myths, the aesthetic sense was
germinating likewise. Away back in the glacial period you find
pictures drawn and scratched upon the reindeer's antler,
portraitures of mammoths and primitive pictures of the chase; you
see the trinkets, the personal decorations, proving beyond question
that the aesthetic sense was there. There has been an immense
aesthetic development since then. And I believe that in the future
it is going to mean far more to us than we have yet begun to
realize. I refer to the kind of training that comes to mankind
through direct operation upon his environment, the incarnation of
his thought, the putting of his ideas into new material relations.
This is going to exert powerful effects of a civilizing kind.
There is something strongly educational and disciplinary in the
mere dealing with matter, whether it be in the manual training
school, whether it be in carpentry, in overcoming the inherent and