Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/490

476 the shell of a gourd, we are using a thing which, in the shape we use it, is a human contrivance, and the contrivances which man has devised for obtaining water and distributing it have been among the most wonderful and ingenious of any which have occupied the human mind. Bountifully as Nature has provided water and placed it within the reach of man, yet we do in fact get or use but little of it except by the aid of inventions.

The air surrounds us at all times and we can not help using it if we would; but, if we want it either hotter or colder than we find it, we must resort to some invention to gratify our want. If we want it to blow upon us when it is still, we must set it in motion by some contrivance, and fans among other things have been invented for that purpose. A large amount of human ingenuity has been expended upon devices for moving air when we want it moved, upon fans, blowers, and ventilators.

How small a part of our food do we take as animals do, in the form provided by Nature, and how very large a share in some form contrived by man! We drink infusions of tea or coffee without thinking that the compounds are human inventions. How large a place the milk of the cow has in the food of man, but how little of it could he have but for a multitude of contrivances! We think of butter as we do of milk, that it is a production of Nature; and so it is, but its separation from milk is an invention which has been followed by a host of inventions to effect the separation easier or better.

Sugar is a production of Nature, but little known a few hundred years ago. Separated from the plants in which it is formed, it is an invention of man. The savage who first crushed some kernels of wheat between two stones, and separated the mealy interior from the outer skin, invented flour, and the human mind has not yet ceased to be exercised on the subject of its improvement.

Probably the earliest inventions of man had reference to the procuring and preparing of food, and the ingenuity of man is exercised even now upon it more eagerly than ever before, and the power of man to produce food has been increased during the last fifty years more than it had been for a thousand years before.

Fifty years ago, a large part of the wheat and other grain raised in this country was cut, a handful at a time, with a sickle, and a man could not, as a rule, reap more than a quarter of an acre a day. An instrument called a cradle was beginning to come into use, and with that a man could reap about two acres.

Within fifty years inventors have given the world the reaping machine, with which a man and two horses will cut from fifteen to twenty acres a day.

Fifty years ago the grain was almost wholly thrashed from the straw by pounding it upon a floor with a flail. If I remember