Of such a character is also this modern technological era. It is in the mechanic arts dealing with brute matter that the modern technology holds over all else, in matter-of-fact insight, in the naïveté of the questions with which its adepts search the facts of observation, and in the crudity (anthropomorphically speaking) of the answers with which they are content to go back to their work. Outside of the mechanic arts this technology must be rated lower than second best. In subtlety of craftsmanlike insight and contrivance or in delicacy of manipulation and adroit use of man’s physical aptitudes the peoples of this Western culture are not now and never have been equal to the best. Such a characterisation of the modern technology may seem too broad and too schematic,--that it overlooks features of the case that are sufficiently large and distinctive to call for their recognition even in the most general characterisation. So, e. g., in the light of what has been noted above in speaking of the domestication of the crop plants and animals, the question may well suggest itself: Is not the patent success of these modern industrial peoples in the use and improvement of crops and cattle to be accepted as evidence of a genial anthropomorphic bent, of the same kind and degree as took effect in the original domestication of plants and animals? For some two hundred years past, it is true, very substantial advances have been made in tillage and breeding, and this is at the same time the peculiar domain in which the anthropomorphic savages of the stone age once achieved those things which have made civilisation physically possible; but the modern gains made in these lines have, in the main if not altogether, been technologically of the same mechanistic character as the rest of the modern advance in the industrial arts, with little help or hindrance due to any such anthropomorphic bias as guided the savage ancients. It is rather by virtue of their having come competently to apprehend these facts of animate nature in substantially inanimate terms, mechanistic and chemical terms, that the modern technological adepts in tillage and cattle-breeding have successfully carried this line of workmanship forward at a rate and with an effect not approached before. The livestock expert is soberly learning by trial and error what to attempt and how to go about it in his breeding experiments, and he deals as callously as any mechanical engineer with the chemistry of stock foods and the use and abuse of ferments, germs and enzymes. The soil specialist talks, thinks and acts in terms of salts, acids, alkalies, stratifications, 200-mesh siftings, and nitrogen-fixing organisms. The crop-plant expert looks to handmade cross-fertilisation and to the Mendelian calculus of hybridisation, with no more imputation of anthropomorphic traits than the metallurgist who analyses fuels and fluxes, mixes ores, and with goggled eye scrutinises the shifting tints