Silicon From the earth man has drawn, in addition to the metals and fuels, many other materials of great service. Silicon is not only one of the commonest elements but one of the most useful as well, although seldom used in pure state. It is due to the properties of the silicates that we are able to have our pottery and earthenware. The potter's wheel was one of man's early and great inventions and first appeared in Egypt. From the silicates we manufacture our glass, an art known to the Egyptians at least five thousand years ago. I have said glass but should say glasses for there is a vast difference in qualities between window glass and that used in optical instruments and an almost equally great difference in materials. It is a far cry from the adobe wall of the Indian pueblo to the brick baked in the oven and colored red by iron and the cement made in enormous cylinders under great heat, then ground to powder, from which we construct our concrete road or use with steel for our skyscrapers, but all are based on silicates. Thousands of combinations have been tried to find those giving us the desired qualities. MECHANICAL SLAVES This chapter is an extremely brief and broken sketch of the chief material elements which man has used. Save for the warning that the visible supplies of some things were decreasing there has been no effort to prophesy what the future may have in store. Man has by no means exhausted the possibilities of nature and the changes now taking place may lead into regions wholly unexplored at present. The course of human development has been away from the exploitation of goods freely offered by nature to the deliberate manufacture of the things desired by man. We still use the terms of the past and speak of candle power though candles are all but unknown to the present generation. We still measure our engines in terms of horse power. Agricultural machinery has changed more since 1850 than in all the centuries prior thereto. Man has passed from the time when he was but one of the brutes of earth to a position of mastery using the domesticated forms as his servants. With the invention of the steam engine a new era dawned. In our own day we are witnessing the shift to an era of electricity and the internal combustion engine. Tractors may replace horses in agriculture as they have in transportation. In China man power remains man power. In the United States by our use of machinery every man has the equivalent of some twenty-eight slaves working for him and magnifying the total output. Contrast this with the average of eleven Negro slaves owned by southern whites before the Civil War and remember that this was the average per owner and not per capita. To take but a single illustration of the difference let us remember that the grain of the world was threshed by a flail in the hands of a man until the nineteenth century. A daily average of 4 bushels per day of grain cut by hand and threshed by a flail is to be contrasted with over 200 bushels where cutting and threshing are done by machinery. Man versus Machine The significance of all this is that the world is being changed from a place on which man lives, helping himself from the table spread before him, to a vast laboratory in which man takes the raw materials and shapes them to suit himself. The essence of his problems is changing likewise. Now it is becoming a question what use man makes of the world. Does he create things helpful or harmful? Can he control the giants he calls into being? Does he understand what he is about and does he understand what has given him the bases of his present life? These are the questions he must answer. The problem has become social rather than physical. REFERENCES 1. S. A. ARRHENIUS, Chemistry in Modern Life, p. 64. 8. HARRIS and BUTT, Scientific Research and Human Welfare, p. 249. 9. S. A. ARRHENIUS, op. cit., p. 77. 10. See for details of metal supplies and uses, "Metal Statistics," published annually by the American Metal Market, New York. II. E. E. SLOSSON, op. cit., pp. 281-282. 12. Ibid., p. 291. 13. HARRIS and BUTT op. cit., p. 236. CHAPTER VIII THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE How small of all the ills that men endure The part that kings or laws can cause or cure! THE ATTACK THROUGH THE AGES -POPE In all ages and in all climes man has found himself the victim of the attacks of a great host of enemies, often invisible, appearing without warning, and causing suffering as well as death. If given a chance he could find shelter from the assaults of the lion and tiger but he was helpless before the "pestilence that walketh in darkness." It is a characteristic of man that he must find some answer to his intellectual problems, whether the answer be logical or fanciful. We may laugh at the ancient idea that insanity was due to moonlight but our own answer in terms of moonshine may be no better. We may smile at the interpretation of disease in terms of indwelling demons but is not the modern "malicious animal magnetism" of the same order? Job argued with his tormentors over the question of a righteous God and the existence of disease in much the same fashion as the priest of to-day. The truth is that our explanations are always a blend of knowledge and superstition, a blend in which we hope the proportion of the former is ever increasing. At all times man has known when he was sick regardless of his ignorance of the cause. So, too, he has always known whether any given course of treatment made him feel better even if he did not know whether the relief was mental or physical. Long before our records begin in any part of the world, man had found by trial and error some remedies for the simpler complaints and had developed rather elaborate methods of treatment in which he had great faith. Many of these seem foolish to us and many of our own ideas are equally foolish. Nevertheless, in no department of our intellectual life have we made greater progress than in medicine, not only in knowledge of fact but in the art as well. Our oldest records, naturally enough, are found in the early civilizations. Early Remedies Before the dawn of history trephining, cupping, castration, venesection, the use of the cautery and of splints were known in many parts of the earth; though the motives that led to the employment of these practices were not in each case identical with those of modern surgery. . . . The Ebers papyrus . . . is a compilation of about the middle of the sixteenth century B.C. It is in the main a collection of prescriptions, some of which had been tried frequently, as we learn from marginal notes, and found good, or excellent. It makes mention of some seven hundred remedies, evidently accumulated in the course of the ages, and put on record and preserved for posterity by the priestly scribes. Among the remedies are found poppy, castoroil, gentian, colchicum, squills, aloes, cedar, mint, myrrh, crocus, hyoscyamus, caraway, elderberries, and many other medicinal herbs, that call to mind the therapy of North American Indians and of all primitive tribes throughout the world. The Egyptian priest-physicians made use also of certain inorganic remedies, such as lead oxide, earthy carbonate of lead, galena, meteoric iron, blue vitriol, crude carbonate of soda, sodium chloride, and sea-salt. Petroleum, bog-water, goose-oil, turpentine, ink (made from charcoal and gum), honey, probably antimony, possible mercurials, found a place in the Egyptian pharmacopoeia.1 In the fifth century Herodotus speaks of the Egyptian physicians as specialists. In Babylon the healing art was also well developed and in the laws we find stipulated the sums the surgeon is to receive for the treatment of domestic animals as well as man, |