A piece of human creation—a manufactured article—is the record, the physical manifestation of our humanness. By these things, reading backward, does the ethnologist reconstruct the vanished races as the paleontologist reconstructs a vanished beast from fossil bones. A bead, a knife, a needle, some torque or bracelet, a broken jar,—and the lost people rise before us. Man, to be such and such, requires such and such things, and evolves them as naturally as the sea-beast makes its shell. It grows from him—so do our manufactures grow from us. Society secretes, as it were, the manufactured article. We need clothes, for instance, a purely social need. The individual animal does not need clothes. He carries his wardrobe on his back. Never a solitary creature in clothes. Clothes are for other people more than the wearer. Other people are required to make them. Even in a one-generation-reversion, as of some hunting hermit of modern times,—back he goes to buckskin! He cannot shear and card, weave and spin, bleach and dye, cut and sew. Back he goes to borrow some other animal’s skin; and, if he stayed a hunting hermit for enough generations, back would he go to his own skin and its natural growth of hair. But the increasing social faculties and desires—the love of ornament, the sense of decency, the need of concealment, the demand for a more fluent and delicate expression of personality—these call for clothes, and society evolves them through a thousand trades. A trade is a social function, and clothing is a social product as hair is a product of the individual body. In the thing made lies our social history so fully that, had we a full line of specimens, we should need no other monument of progress. The progress of each age rests on its things: the unchipped flint and the polished; the bronze knife and the steel; the wonder-working wheel (how much of social progress goes “on wheels”!); the bow and arrow, the sword, the axe, the spade,—small things for separate use at first,—and then the marvellous, monster engines of to-day; they are at once the means and the record of progress. There is a phase of thought which despises “material things,” and prattles ardently of our “spiritual nature.” But in steady-marching ages of coincidence man’s spiritual nature manifests itself through material things, and grows by means of them. The ships of Tyre made possible that Phœnician civilisation which has so affected the Grecian and all that follow. The roads of Rome knit and fastened her Empire to the ends of the earth.