THE ALBANIAN people have a story that the Creator recently visited the earth and was astonished to find how it had changed. “Why, this is not the earth I created,” He said. “Everything has changed. My forests are cut down; My rivers have been diverted from their courses; My hills have been blasted away, and My mountains have been robbed of their minerals. The whole face of the earth has been altered.” But in the course of His roamings, the Creator suddenly came upon the land of Albania. “Ah!” He exclaimed in delight. “Here is a bit of earth untouched by man. It is still just as I made it.” Man’s ambition to make over the face of the earth to his own liking dates far back of the present age of machinery. However, the work of the ancient engineer was accomplished only at the expense of decades and generations of hard manual labor. To-day, with powerful and gigantic machinery to do our bidding, we do not hesitate to change the course of rivers, to level off the hills, to carve highways through the mountains and pierce them with tunnels, to bore into their depths for treasure and drive deep holes into the bowels of the earth in quest of liquid fuel. We are able to machine the earth in much the same way as a piece of metal is machined in the machine shop. In fact, the drill, the circular saw, the slotter, and even the milling machine have their counterpart in the excavating machinery of to-day. Of course we cannot expect to find the counterpart of such machines as the lathe, boring mill, and planer, in which the work revolves against the tool, because this planet of ours is rather too big a piece of stock to be placed between lathe centers or to be bolted to a planer bed. MECHANICAL MONSTERS The twentieth century finds this planet again stocked with monsters larger and more powerful than the gigantic saurians that dominated the earth in the Jurassic and Cretaceous epochs, but our mighty fire-breathing, steel-sinewed beasts are humbly subservient to the will of man. The spectacle of a large steam shovel at work makes one feel at once very small and very big. Before the work of this monster the human shoveler shrinks to the proportions of a mere insect. Seven to eight cubic yards shoveled into a cart is considered a fair day’s work for a laborer, but a big steam shovel can easily gobble up as much material in two bites. However, when we contemplate that this mammoth machine is a human creation and an absolute slave to human command, we are rather inclined to be puffed up with the greatness of man.