Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/154

 118 plants a grove and the multitude bask under its shade. One man composes a song and millions of patriotic or devout voices sing it. One man devises an institution and nations are blessed thereby. So has it been since the origin of man. This is the distinctly human characteristic.

If there ever existed a man who in his life never departed from beaten tracks to do or think originally, he was an imbecile. Should there be found living in the suburbs of a city or of the world a family or a tribe not contributing in the least to that change for the better which constitutes the progress of mankind, that group of human beings have done this favor, at least, of keeping alive the memories and practices of the past, and have preserved the history of lower stages of culture.

Invention has experienced a fivefold evolution or elaboration,—1, in the needs or wants out of which all empiricism springs; 2, in the mental act, the process in the mind of the experimenter; 3, in the processes and products of the work, in the manner of operation and in the thing effected; 4, in the rewards of the effort, public and private; 5, in the tribal or national genius and idiosyncrasies engendered. From the very first man worthy of the name to the latest decade of the nineteenth century this empiricism has never ceased.

At the very first, as at the very last, invention springs from two causes, needs and resources. The wants, the appetites of men, on the one hand, and the possible means of gratifying them in each area on the other, constitute the stimulus to experiment. As the wants of men are quite uniform in each grade of culture, the resources of the earth, the total environment, varying in character and amount from place to place, has been the uncertain quantity for each race or people.

The evolution of wants is seen in the creation of new desires with progress and the greater complexity of each want as it became more exacting. The hungry stomach of a savage, for instance, craves not more than two or three articles of diet prepared after the crudest methods. But the same organ in the higher races will not be satisfied with less than half a dozen viands at least, served in as many fashions.

The same is true of the desires for shelter, dress, sensuous pleasures, social pleasures, intellectual gratification, religious