that the car turned the suburban housewife into a full-time chauffeur. Certainly the transformations of the wheel as expediter of tasks, and architect of ever-new human relations, is far from finished, but its shaping power is waning in the electric age of information, and that fact makes us much more aware of its characteristic form as now tending toward the archaic. Before the emergence of the wheeled vehicle, there was merely the abrasive traction principle -runners, skids, and skis preceded wheels for vehicles, just as the abrasive, semirotary motion of the hand-operated spindle and drill preceded the full, free rotary motion of the potter's wheel. There is a moment of translation or "abstraction" needed to separate the reciprocating movement of hand from the free movement of wheel. "Doubtless the notion of the wheel came originally from observing that rolling a log was easier than shoving it," writes Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization. Some might object that log-rolling is closer to the spindle operation of the hands than to the rotary movement of feet, and need never have got translated into the technology of wheel. Under stress, it is more natural to fragment our own bodily form, and to let part of it go into another material, than it is to transfer any of the motions of external objects into another material. To extend our bodily postures and motions into new materials, by way of amplification, is a constant drive for more power. Most of our bodily stresses are interpreted as needs for extending storage and mobility functions, such as occur, also, in speech, money, and writing. All manner of utensils are a yielding to this bodily stress by means of extensions of the body. The need for storage and portability can readily be noted in vases, jars, and "slow matches" (stored fire). Perhaps the main feature of all tools and machines -economy of gesture --is the immediate expression of any physical pressure which impels us to outer or to extend ourselves, whether in words or in wheels. Man can say it with flowers or plows or locomotives. In "Krazy Kat," Ignatz said it with bricks.