the adoption of new instruments.”

     Had we meditated on such a basic fact as that long ago, 
we might easily have mastered the nature and effects of all our 
technologies, instead of being pushed around by them. At any 
rate, The Gutenberg Galaxy  is a prolonged meditation on that 
theme of J. Z. Young.

     Nobody has been more conscious of the futility of our 
closed systems of historical writing than Abbott Payson Usher. 
His classic, A History of Mechanical Inventions , is an 
explanation of why such closed systems cannot make contact 
with the facts of historical change: “The cultures of antiquity 
do not fit the patterns of the linear sequences of social and 
economic evolution developed by the German Historical 
Schools. . . . If linear concepts of development are abandoned