Excerpt from Industrial and Commercial Geography A group of people can only prosper, increase and grow powerful when their environment furnishes them an abundance of food and of materials for making appliances to supply the other necessities of existence. Examine them as we may, we find that every want of man, whether Eskimo or banker, is a desire for one of these six classes of goods: food, clothes, house or shelter, fuel, luxuries, and tools and materials of industry which enable him to produce and handle the others. So nearly universal are these wants that practically all men have all six classes of goods. Even savages have luxuries in the form of toys, ornaments, and musical instruments. All these materials for a living come directly or indirectly out of the soil or crust of the earth. The man in a ship at sea or in a steel sky-scraper in a modern city gets his sustenance from the soil just as surely as does the farmer who takes potatoes from the furrow. Each particular method by which a man gets some useful commodity leads to an industry Often of world wide distribution. To understand the way the human race turns the earth into its home, we have but to study the various industries by which groups of men achieve their living. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.