muscle of the peasant grandparents, thirty years in which to compact
the nerve and brain of parents; thirty years more in which the heir of
these ancestral gifts shall enter into full-orbed power and stand forth
fully furnished for his task. Nature makes a dead snowflake in a
night, but not a living star-flower. For her best things nature asks
long time.

The time-principle holds equally in man's social and industrial life.
To-day our colleges have their anthropological departments and our
cities their museums. The comparative study of the dress, weapons,
tools, houses, ships of savage and civilized races gives an outline
view of the progress of society. How fragile and rude the handiwork of
savages! How quickly are the wants provided for! A few fig leaves
make a full summer suit for the African and the skin of an ox his garb
for winter. But civilized man must toil long upon his loom for
garments of wool and fine silk. Slowly the hollow log journeys toward
the ocean steamer; slowly the forked stick gives place to the
steam-plow, the slow ox to the swift engine; slowly the sea-shell, with
three strings tied across its mouth, develops into the many-mouthed
pipe-organ. But if rude and low conveniences represent little time and
toil, these later inventions represent centuries of arduous labor. In
his history of the German tribes, Tacitus gives us a picture of a day's
toil for one of the forest children. Moving to the banks of some new
stream, the rude man peels the bark from the tree and bends it over the
tent pole; with a club he beats down the nuts from the branches; with a
round stone he knocks the squirrel from the bough; another hour
suffices for cutting a line from the ox's hide and, hastily making a
hook out of the wishbone of the bird, he draws the trout from its
stream. But if for savage man a day suffices for building and
provisioning the tent, the accumulated wisdom of centuries is required