nergy to war and the hunt, both, in primitive life, functions
of the strongest muscles, made it necessary for the domestic
activities, which are essentially functions of the small muscles, to
be carried out by women. The whole history of the machine demonstrates
this economic tendency to make activities dependent upon those muscles
which presuppose the smallest psychophysical effort. It is not only
the smaller effort which gives economic advantage to the stimulation
of the smaller muscles, but the no less important circumstance that
the psychophysical after-effect of their central excitement exerts
less inhibition than the after-effect of the brain excitement for the
big muscles.

But we must not overlook another feature in the development of
technique. The machines have been constantly transformed in the
direction which made it possible to secure the greatest help from the
natural cooerdination of bodily movements. The physiological
organization and the psychophysical conditions of the nervous system
make it necessary that the movement impulses flow over into motor side
channels and thus produce accessory effects without any special
effort. If a machine is so constructed that these natural accessory
movements must be artificially and intentionally suppressed, it means,
on the one side, a waste of available psychophysical energy, and on
the other side it demands a useless effort in order to secure this
inhibition. The industrial development has moved toward both the
fructification of those side impulses and the avoidance of these
inhibitions. It has adjusted itself practically to the natural
psychical conditions. Ultimately it is this tendency which shaped the
technical apparatus for the economic work until the muscle movements
could become rhythmical. The rhythmical activity necessarily involves
a psychophysical saving and this saving has been instinctively secured
throughout the history of civilization. All rhythm contains a
repetition of movement without making a real repetition of the
psychophysical impulse necessary. In the rhythmical activity a large
part of the first excitement still serves for the second, and the
second for the third. Inhibitions fall away and the mere after-effect
of each stimulus secures a great saving for the new impulse. The
history of the machine even indicates that the newer technical
development not only found the far-reaching division of labor already
in the workshops of earlier centuri