Part XIII

2

3

4 Of first special interest regarding the development of these mechanical extensions, as we pursue man’s differential degree of survival supremacy, is the characteristic

5 of intermittent employment,—

6 a frequency qualification,—of the various extensions.

7 As examples of intermittent employment:—it is to be noted that

8 man does not write or drink (as a rule) throughout twenty-four hours of the day, therefore he need not encumber himself with a pencil bound on

9 to his index finger,

10 nor with a mechanical cup extension

11 of the integral grappling crane

12 during the non-writing and non-drinking balance of the ‘‘time.’’

13 But he does have constant necessity to see when awake,

14 and if his integral eye lenses are annoyingly defective he wears glasses about sixteen hours each day.

15 Birds and many other living specie of higher organisms also have intermittently employed mechanical extensions, for instance:—the bird’s nest, an extension of the womb function, required only once a year, is abandoned and flown back to annually.

16 The same with the beehive and the bee, and the wasp and its streamlined inverted mosque; the fox and his burrow.

17 But possibly most interesting as a ‘‘timed’’ extension example, involving degrees of advanced and delayed action, is the spider’s net and the spider.

18 That beautifully engineered radial suspension device literally oozes out like nylon from the integral body glands of the spider, becoming separated from it at will at the proper tactical moments while weaving that ‘‘cum laude’’ designed diaphanous yet hurricane-proof dew jewel clustering

19 dynamic geometry projection in webbed survival extension.

20 In precisely the same manner, the sky writer at twelve thousand feet in the blue valves off and on

21 his letter making white smoke, from his mechanically extended aeronautical glands writing the signature

22 at the Publicitor’s relayed behest and by stratosphere proxy, of Mr.

23 I. J. Fox,

24 who, by devious mechanical extension in identical survival procedure reason or no

25 weaves his sales net in the sky, of a sunny day,

26 and his ethereal radio net in the night sky,—decoyingly hovered through

27 by his fire-fly, airplane flown, moving type, letter lights,—even as the spider;

28 later to wrap up his ensnared victims and extract the life juice.

29 However, in the human case, that life juice is fortunately an abstracted extract;—a green ink extract engraved on fine paper

30 called money by man:—a civilized symbol-extract a token extension attesting commonworth of its bearer whose effort super to self-perpetuation has been turned to commonwealth account increasing mutual survival probability.

31 Or the ‘‘juice’’ is possibly even more abstract,—is simply a pure time credit extension mentally noted by those concerned involving only imagination ‘‘cracking’’ and an intelligence amplified human work unit ‘‘fractionation’’ mutually satisfactory to intersurvival accounting without question of death imposition;—except for the animal whose pelt was involved and relatively of the trapper whose hazards were under-rewarded.

32 But fur is now being synthesized out of inorganic materials in a manner superior to ‘‘nature’’ so far as human use is concerned.

33 And that brings us reasonably to comprehension of the degree to which man alone qualitatively and quantitatively has developed this mechanical extension ability;—to now far beyond any other living specie.

34 Physically attesting this super degree it may be recognized by this mechanical extension concept, that a U.S.A, man is today and, to the best of our knowledge, in all time as yet not only the largest of all mobile creatures,—but also, by far the most versatile.

35 For each U.S.A, man has now extension members comprising nine and a half tons of steel and twenty-two tons of concrete, but without that concomitant loss of mobility of the formerly privileged pharoah when similarly tonnaged under his pyramid.

36 For the U.S.A, man’s demountable shell is sometimes a ninety-mile-an-hour, one-and-a-half ton affair on four pneumatic tires.

37 Sometimes it is a four-hundred-mile-an-hour two-ton, science-sculptured jewel;

38 Sometimes a thirty-knot seventy-thousand-ton fish form. Sometimes it is a billion-ton skyscraping pinacle within which he elevator-rockets ad lib, and he can whisper clearly around the world

39 and God only knows how far out into space.

40 And he differs in cross-bred operational specie characteristic from a contemporary European or an Asiatic man far more widely than

41 any bird differs from any whale.

42 For instance, as compared

43 with any other man in the world he has ninety-nine per cent

44 of all existing plumbing connected bathtubs.

45 These mutual extensions

46 must be averaged not only to population number

47 but also to literacy

48 and erudition qualifications of the population

49 and to the latter’s teleologic facilities

50 in books, and universities

51 in sciences and the arts

52 in all of which the U.S.A.

53 per capita differential degree

54 is enormously greater at present.

55 The supremacy of U.S.A, man

56 as a universal industrialized prototype

57 bespeaks great world doings tomorrow,

58 as the many attain

59 to the advancing U.S.A, standards.

60 However, common not only to all men but to all organic life at first remove from life itself, is the simple protoplasmic cell, master of photosynthesis by which star energy is physically translated directly or indirectly through storage devices into the mechanics integral and extended which comprise and differentiate each and every species and each never identical individual mechanism of life’s expression of intense interest in its limitless potential.