CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY ANALYSIS WHEN students find themselves called upon, either by the probable needs of their future career or by a laudable curiosity, to embark on a new course of study, they are subject to a very natural desire to know, in a general way, what that study is all about-what kind of skill they will have to acquire, what sort of facts to assimilate. This desire is not only natural, it is reasonable and right; and we will start by trying to do what little can be done in advance for its satisfaction. 66 As we walk through a street in London or any other great city, in the portion of that city where shops abound, it will need but small powers of observation to bring home to us the wonderful complexity of the state of society in which we live and move in these modern times. It is literally the fact that the world has been ransacked from China to Peru" to supply the wants of the inhabitants of such a city. An omnibus or a taxi-cab will take us through such a street in a few minutes of time, yet in that short time and within that narrow space we have passed through the collected tribute of an entire world, and surveyed the products of man's power, accumulated through all the ages. Let us observe our street and its contents a little more closely. The pathway on which we walk is probably, if our city is a very modern one, paved with an artificial stone, harder and therefore more durable than any available natural kind ; and machinery of enormous power has first ground the material into a fine powder, mixed it as easily as a cook stirs our breakfast porridge, and allowed it to consolidate under a mighty pressure into slabs of the required shape and size. But the roadway is provided for in quite another fashion. Here is wood paving; and the wood has to be harder than any that grows in a temperate climate like ours. Timber has been brought from distant forests, and the great steam-driven circular saw has riven the logs into the requisite form for paving-blocks; and these have been laid on a bed of carefully levelled cement and united by intervening bands of pitch. A vast organisation therefore lies under our feet as we walk or ride the length of our street. And as evening comes the windows all light up, with gas or electricity, conveyed thither by such a maze of pipes and wires that if we could see the whole of it as it lies underground, it would look as if some giant hands had been trying to weave a fishing net of iron. And then the shops. Let us not pass them without giving a thought to the wondrous facts that lie behind the diversity of their display of goods. Here is a garment for a lady's winter wear, labelled 'All Wool," and in colour mauve; and the wool has come from those Antipodes in whose existence our forefathers could not bring themselves to believe, and the colour was the discovery, but a few years ago, of one of our greatest chemists. And in the same window we see silk fabrics whereof 66 |