Much, however, of the exertion required in all industries, especially in farming, is simply "to fetch and carry." It will emphasize this fact to study, while you eat a piece of cherry pie, the processes involved in bringing it from the treetop, grainfield, dairy and cane-field, through mill and store and pantry and oven, to your plate. Transportation cuts a tremendous figure in production of wealth. In the first stages of social life it is almost the whole. The hunter talks of "bringing in" his game. Australians, Hottentots and Digger Indians lived by carrying themselves from one supply of food to another.
_Transformation in production._--Much of the material gathered by us needs some change of form to suit our wants. An ax-helve has in it the original wood of the young hickory brought from the forest, but its form is fashioned by effort with ax, drawshave, scraper and sandpaper, until it satisfies the judgment of an expert chopper. This transformation is employed in any industries where wood, ivory, the metals and other minerals are shaped by tools, or by molding, or pressing or bending, to our wishes. Most fabrics are materials put into form. The word manufacture covers most of such work where materials are manipulated by shaping; but it also includes many operations with a different aim, to change the substance itself.
_Transmutation in production._--Men have found that two metals, tin and copper, melted together produce brass, different in qualities from either. Farmers have for many centuries contrived, by keeping nature's forces under control in the wheat field, to combine certain elements of the soil, including its moisture, into grain. The single seed has multiplied a hundredfold through being placed in favorable conditions, with the raw materials at hand in the fertile soil.
The process of maintaining animals with suitable food for the production of milk or flesh is similar. The combination of flour, water, salt and yeast, by heat, first mild and then intense, into a loaf of bread is a good illustration of a change of qualities by rearrangement of the elements of a substance. It is sometimes called transmutation, and comes the nearest possible to creation of material things. The chemist's laboratory exists for making such new combinations, and many of the arts produce materials, like steel, which would not exist without such combination. But many have seen in the art of agriculture a most prominent illustration of transmuting coarser elements into products adapted to human wants for food, shelter and adornment. All such work, however, is done by bringing objects and forces into such contact that chemical or vital changes will take place while we wait.