Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/380

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powell] TECHNOLOGY, OR THE SCIENCE OF INDUSTRIES 329

and silver are in like manner produced as substances and wrought into forms which serve men's purposes for welfare.

Plants are used for fuel and wrought into forms that they may be utilized in stoves and furnaces. Plants are also wrought into forms of lumber and used in constructing forms of houses, furni- ture, vehicles, and ten thousand other shapes, that they may be useful to man ; and many substances are extracted from plants to be wrought into forms. Many resins are used in this manner ; indeed the productions of forms from the product of the rubber tree that are useful to man are too great for enumeration.

Time fails me to tell of the innumerable forms into which animal substances are wrought for the use of man. But animal substances and vegetal substances have their grand use as food. The forms into which they are converted before they reach the entelic use are innumerable, but the subject is so often illustrated in daily life that to call attention to the fact is all that is necessary to our purpose.

In the production of entelic forms many ancillary forms are produced. These, perhaps, are so apparent that they need no further illustration ; but the forms which are produced by man through industrial processes that serve the entelic purpose of welfare are innumerable, and when we distinguish them it be- comes necessary for us to group these industries under one term in order that they may properly be distinguished from the indus- tries of substantiation and from others which we have yet to consider. I shall therefore call them the industries of construe- tion, as that term seems best to convey the concept. In late years there has grown up in science the use of a term which clearly sets forth the nature of the products of construction as the term is here used. This is artifact ; the products of construc- tion are artifacts. Construction, therefore, is the industry of producing artifacts, just as substantiation is the industry of pro- ducing substances. As substantiation is the art of producing substances from air, water, rock, plant, and animal, so construe-

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