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 centuries, but a no less far-reaching rhythmization of the labor in fine adaptation to the needs of the psychophysical organism, long before the appearance of the machines.  The beginnings of the machine period frequently showed nothing but an imitation of the rhythmical movements of man.[26] To be sure, the later improvements of the machine have frequently destroyed that original rhythm of man’s movement, as the movement itself, especially in the electric machines, has become so quick that the subjective rhythmical experience has been lost.  Moreover,