One of the deplorable tendencies in Economic study comes from a disposition among advanced students to think exclusively within such narrow fields as banking, manufacturing, transportation, merchandizing, the cotton trade, the silk industry or agriculture. All trustworthy Economic thinking must be from fundamentals--from Natural Resources, Man and Artificial Objects--to the minute details of the respective Economic specializations. All Economic specializations, to the uttermost of their Economic minuteness, are subject fundamentally and in their mutual relations to the natural Economic laws that govern the inter-relationship of the three Basic Facts--Artificial Objects, Man and Natural Resources. That barrel of potatoes in the retail store may serve for an example. The barrel itself, an Artificial Object, was produced by Man from antecedent Artificial Objects--staves and hoops. The staves and the hoops were produced by Man from preceding Artificial Objects--lumber and iron. The lumber and the iron had come from trees felled and ores extracted by Man; the trees were Natural Resources, unless cultivated by Man, in which case they were Artificial Objects produced from and upon Natural Resources (the earth) and descended from trees which in their earlier days were themselves Natural Resources. The iron ore was an Artificial Object produced by Man from Natural Resources known as ore deposits. So the barrel holding those potatoes at that retail store proves to be throughout its whole Economic history nothing but a combination of many kinds of Artificial Objects every one of which has been produced and all of which have been combined by Man from and upon and within the Natural Resources of earth and air and light and heat and electricity and other natural characteristics of the planet that Man inhabits. So, also, of the potatoes in the barrel. And like that barrel and those potatoes, the retail store in which we find them was itself produced through many Economic specializations and many stages of industrial progress, each of which, from the extraction of iron from natural mineral deposits and the taking of timber from natural forests, was a production by Man of Artificial Objects from and upon and within the sphere of Natural Resources down to the placement of that artificial structure, the retail store, upon its Natural-Resource site at an advantageous point for delivering finished products to ultimate consumers. As to that barrel of potatoes and that retail store upon the floor of which it rests, so of all Economic phenomena. They belong respectively, according to their respective Economic characteristics and pursuant to natural law, in one or another of the three categories or Basic Facts which we have respectively identified as Natural Resources, Man, and Artificial Objects.