In the relatively early stages of primitive culture the useful plants and minerals are, no doubt, made use of in a wild state, as, _e.g._, fish and timber have continued to be used. Yet in so far as they are useful they are unmistakably to be counted in among the material equipment ("tangible assets") of the community. The case is well illustrated by the relation of the Plains Indians to the buffalo, and by the northwest coast Indians to the salmon, on the one hand, and by the use of a wild flora by such communities as the Coahuilla Indians,[3] the Australian blacks, or the Andamanese, on the other hand. But with the current of time, experience, and initiative, domesticated (that is to say improved) plants and animals come to take the first place. We have then such "technological expedients" in the first rank as the many species and varieties of domestic animals, and more particularly still the various grains, fruits, root-crops, and the like, virtually all of which were created by man for human use; or perhaps a more scrupulously veracious account would say that they were in the main created by the women, through long ages of workmanlike selection and cultivation. These things, of course, are useful because men have learned their use, and their use, so far as it has been learned, has been learned by protracted and voluminous experience and experimentation, proceeding at each step on the accumulated achievements of the past. Other things, which may in time come to exceed these in usefulness are still useless, economically non-existent, on the early levels of culture, because of what men in that time have not yet learned. * * * * *