One of the tests of rank in civilization is appreciation of workmanship. The savage knows nothing of mechanics beyond the power of a lever in prying up a rock, the action of a bowstring, or crude facts of this sort. A machine to him is not only incomprehensible, but supernatural: a locomotive is a fire-devil, and a loom or a printing-press, should he see one, a useful spirit. At the other end of the scale of appreciation of mechanical appliances is the inventor who devises or the trained engineer who understands the most complicated engines of modern ingenuity. Somewhere between stands any one of us,—the ordinary pupil presumably far above the savage, but far below the expert. In the appreciation of the art of the painter, at the bottom of the scale is the bushman who can look at the clever painting of a man and not know what it represents, and at the top the great painters of the world and those who can best enter into the spirit of their productions. In this scale again each of us stands somewhere; the average school-boy is unhappily likely to be so far down as to take delight in the colored illustrations of the Sunday newspapers and to be utterly indifferent to a Titian or a Rembrandt. In comprehension of the value and effect of language, the same principle obtains. The scale extends from the savage tribes with a vocabulary of but a few hundred words for the entire speech of the race and no power of making combinations beyond the simplest, to the cultivated nations with perhaps a couple of hundred thousand words and the art of producing the highest forms of prose and of poetry. The scale is a long one, and its development has taken uncounted ages; but somewhere in the line each individual has his place. The degree of the civilization of a race is unerringly determined by its command of the written word; the mental rank of the individual is no less certainly fixed by his power of using and of comprehending human speech.