more patient efforts than the calendar. Nevertheless, there is
none the enjoyment of which can now be procured more cheaply, and
which, consequently, by our own definitions, has become more
necessary. How, then, shall we explain this change? Why has the
calendar, so useless to the early hordes, who only needed the
alternation of night and day, as of winter and summer, become at
last so indispensable, so unexpensive, so perfect? For, by a
marvelous harmony, in social economy all these adjectives are
interconvertible. How account, in short, by our law of
proportion, for the variability of the value of the calendar?

In order that the labor necessary to the production of the
calendar might be performed, might be possible, man had to find
means of gaining time from his early occupations and from those
which immediately followed them. In other words, these
industries had to become more productive, or less costly, than
they were at the beginning: which amounts to saying that it was
necessary first to solve the problem of the production of the
calendar from the extractive industries themselves.

Suppose, then, that suddenly, by a fortunate combination of
efforts, by the division of labor, by the use of some machine, by
better management of the natural resources,--in short, by his
industry,--Prometheus finds a way of producing in one day as much
of a certain object as he formerly produced in ten: what will
follow? The product will change its position in the table of the
elements of wealth; its power of affinity for other products, so
to speak, being increased, its relative value will be
proportionately diminished, and, instead of being quoted at one
hundred, it will thereafter be quoted only at ten. But this