The mineral kingdom.
The mineral kingdom did most to emancipate the fancy and develop the genius and strength of men through stone and metal; for women, its pedagogic efforts were through the pliant and versatile clay and the water springs. Find a region south of the line of severe cold where clay abounds, coupled with demand for sedentary life, there the ceramic art in primitive times was efflorescent. The clay and the woman gradually become refined and exalted. The qualities of the material were discovered and developed, the great possibilities of manual refinement and dexterity found a worthy arena. In later times Keramos came to be a man, because machinery supplanted the hand; but at first potters were women.
On the other hand, if you except the scraper and the household knife, in flakable, siliceous stone, the worker in stone was always a man. Piercing and slashing weapons had their points and edges worked by men. It is with admiration that we now look upon the products of knack and patience kept in museums as precious relics of the men of old. Wherever the best flint was known there the men were quite equal to play upon the material and to be played upon by it, the flint and the artist being mutually perfected.
But friable stone had in it even more for man than flint. The gem cutter, the sculptor, and the architect went to school to crystals, to calcareous and volcanic stone. The flaker was invented for flint, but the hammer, the bushing tool, the chisel, the rasp, the diamond drill, the saw, the emery wheel and engineering appliances were all devised by men at the invitation of art and architectural stones. In those areas Mhere these last abound men were regenerated. A casual glance at the map of the Western Hemisphere shows that only where the engineer and the architect were called for was there aboriginally any approach to civilization.
The forces of nature.
Professor Rouleau, of Berlin, divides culture into phases which he calls 'manganic' and 'naturistic'; the former term applies to the use of machinery and the domestication of nature's forces, the latter to that condition of culture in which the hand was aided by the simplest appliances. On every grade of culture women were more naturistic than men. Any culture area, therefore, which afforded occasion and stimulus for the employment of mechanical powers, the forces of nature, and continuous organized effort of mind and muscle was virile and most propitious for men.
Nor are conditions of climate and daylight to be neglected in this connection. For men, progress was more difficult in uncongenial climes. Women had sheltered, indoor temperature artificialized in the frozen zone with the help of the lamp-stove. Hence all the enduring monu-
