skill of those who use them; and like animals and plants,
adapting themselves each to its own place in the universal
order, they attain to beauty by force of being fit. That law
of adaptation which shapes the wings of a swallow and
prescribes the poise and elegance of the branches of trees
is the same that demands symmetry in the corn-rick and
convexity in the beer-barrel; the same that, exerting itself
with matchless precision through the trained senses of
haymakers and woodmen, gives the final curve to the handles
of their scythes and the shafts of their axes. Hence the
beauty of a tool is an unfailing sign that in the proper
handling of it technique is present ...

'It is not the well-informed and those eager to teach', he says in
another passage,

who know the primitive necessary lore of civilization; it is
the illiterate. In California, Louis Stevenson found men
studying the quality of vines grown on different pockets of
earth, just as the peasants of Burgundy and the Rhine have
done for ages. And even so the English generations have
watched the produce of their varying soils. When or how was
it learnt--was it at Oxford or at Cambridge?--that the
apples of Devonshire are so specially fit for cider? Or how
is it that hops are growing--some of them planted before
living memory--all along the strip of green sand which
encircles the Weald--that curious strip to which text-books
at last point triumphantly as being singularly adapted for
hops? Until it got into the books, this piece of knowledge
was not thought of as learning; it had merely been acted
upon during some centuries. But such knowledge exists,
boundless, in whatever direction one follows it: the
knowledge of fitting means to ends: excellent rule-of-thumb
knowledge, as good as the chemist uses for analyzing water.
When the peculiar values of a plot of land have been
established--as, for instance, that it is a clay 'too
strong' for bricks--then further forms of localized
knowledge are brought to supplement this, until at last the
bricks are made. Next, they must be removed from the field;
and immediately new problems arise. The old farm-cart,
designed for roots or manure, has not the most suitable
shape for brick-carting. Probably, too, its wide wheels,
which were