Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/549

Rh on shall more fully see, has a brain which is insufficient for his mode of life, and it is therefore constantly overtaxed by the amount of mental and emotional activity required of it. This, too, is the one antecedent condition and primal cause underlying, lifting, and advancing not only his but all human brain development, and probably all brain development.

Here we must leave for a time the savage and consider the present condition of the routine laborer.

He, on the other hand, has more cranial capacity, and convolutional development than he needs or knows what to do with. Two great changes have recently come over the whole civilized world, and among many other far-reaching effects these two changes have left him in this unfortunate condition. In the first place, machinery has taken the place of implements, and the latent energy of lifeless matter has been transformed into kinetic force and has taken the place of muscular power. The greater and constantly increasing part of his food is sown by machinery, cultivated by machinery, harvested, thrashed, transported, ground, cooked, and brought to his door by machinery. He is clothed, sheltered, and shod by machinery. His house, except the putting of it together, is made by machinery. The water of a distant lake or stream is brought through pipes to his very lips by machinery. His furniture, utensils, and tools are all made by machinery. His distant communications are conveyed by machinery. . He himself is transported about from place to place by machinery. His cradle and his coffin are made by machinery, and from the time he leaves the one till he enters the other he is lucky if he finds any more soul-stirring or intellectual employment than feeding, watering, shining up, waiting upon, and serving a machine.

The second great change is of a social character, but it has been greatly hastened and extended as a result of the first. At any rate, the two, each supplementing the other, have left his inherited cerebral outfit almost wholly unemployed, as compared with its busy activity at a time not very remote, even in the age of our grandfathers, when, like the savage, the worker cared for himself and his family and did nearly everything for himself, instead of doing possibly, as at present, some one thing for himself, and having all else done for him.

His children now receive a rudimentary education in public institutions, their moral and religious instruction is received in the free Sunday school; hospitals, dispensaries, and doctors take care of him when ill, and charitable societies take charge of him when he comes to want; savings banks receive his money and manage his investments; insurance companies relieve him from the calamities of fire and flood, accidents, illness, and death; public