our ancestors because they have been pronounced good by those who know. We erect our altars, sing our traditional songs, and celebrate our sacred dances for rain that our corn may germinate and yield abundant harvest.

The town crier calls at dawn from the house top the following announcement, which is the key to the whole explanation of the Tusayan ritual:

"All people awake, open your eyes, arise,

Become Talahoya (child of light), vigorous, active, sprightly.

Hasten clouds from the four world quarters;

Come snow in plenty, that water may be abundant when summer comes. Come ice and cover the fields, that after planting they may yield abundantly; Let all hearts be glad;

The knowing ones will assemble in four days;

They will encircle the village dancing and singing their lays

That moisture may come in abundance.”

I have limited myself to showing that the arid climatic conditions are reflected from the rites of one tribe of Indians, and it would be instructive to see whether these facts are of importance from the comparative side. There are other equally arid regions of the globe where we might justly look for the same results if this climatic condition is as powerful in the modification of cults as implied. There are marked similarities in the climate of Arabia, of Peru, and of Assyria, and as a consequence startling resemblances in their rituals. But there are many differences; and we thus detect that our analyses of causes has not been complete or ultimate, for we have limited it to but one powerful element in the modifications of ceremonials.

Environment is a complicated nexus of influences, organic and inorganic, threads of which we can successfully trace a certain distance, but which eludes as we go further. There are many effects where causes remain to be discovered, and many climatic influences on cults have yet to be clearly discerned.

A few words more and I have done. Theories among civilized men, like things among savages, may become fetishes. It would be lamentable if environment should become a word to conjure with, or if we should use it to cover ignorance of that which we can not explain. I have tried to show that one highly complicated ritual is so plastic that it responds to climatic conditions, but there are elements in it due to some other unknown cause. Because climatic conditions explain certain modifications in human culture the tendency would be to strive to make it do duty in explaining all. Such a generalization is premature and unscientific. The theory that differences of species of animals and plants were due to climatic influences may have satisfied the early students of evolution before Charles Darwin pointed out the law of natural selection. Environment is a factor which profoundly affects animals, but a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive is a law of evolution.

So environment is a potent influence on the culture of man, but there are laws, as yet not clearly made out, back of it which control the evolution of man.

When in the struggle for existence the fittest came to be measured by degrees of intelligence, and no longer by superiority of bodily structure, climatic conditions were still powerful to modify and stimulate thought. The increase in intelligence due to these agents did not develop a new species, for, to whatever heights he rises, man still remains Homo sapiens. If, then, the specific identity of all individual men on the globe to-day is true, the superstitions which we have studied are errors of minds like our own, but imperfectly developed and modified by environment. In her mistakes, said the great naturalist Geoffroy St. Hilaire, nature betrays her secrets. By a study of erroneous working of the mind and their probable causes we can discover the nature of mind. Below all ceremonials among all men, savage or barbarous, may be traced aspirations akin to our own since they spring from our common nature. Until some philosopher shall arise who can so analyze environment as to demonstrate that the great religious teachers of man, who, suddenly appearing, have stimulated the race to great bounds in progress, were solely the products of surroundings, we may believe that there is another most potent influence behind environment controlling the development of culture. Throughout all history man, from his own consciousness, has recognized that controlling influence to be higher than environment, and no science nor philosophy has yet succeeded in banishing the thought from his mind.

1

THE RELATION OF INSTITUTIONS TO ENVIRONMENT.

By W J MCGEE.!

THE RELATIONS OF ORGANISMS.2

The career of the organism, as individual species or larger group, may be considered as the resultant of two forces, viz, (1) the initial or directing force operating through heredity, and (2) the secondary or modifying force operating through interaction with environment.

The potency of environment in shaping the career of the organism is illustrated by the forest. Primarily the plant depends for existence on soil and climate, and vitality fails if these conditions are adverse; when soil and climate are measurably favorable the fitter plants strive for supremacy and some tower above their competitors. Commonly the trees bear multitudes of seeds, that the species may survive even though many seeds fall on stony ground and many young shoots may choke among brambles; the cypress, pine, and other trees combine to form dense and lofty mantles of foliage beneath which alien plants are smothered; and through these and other means forests are produced. Initially the tree strives against alien species, but when its kind comes to prevail the trees strive against one another and the strongest, loftiest, and hardiest survive; and thus internecine strife as well as strife against the alien makes for excellence among trees. So the forest is shaped by environment, beginning with external conditions and ending with the mutual relation between individuals; and the career of the forest tree is one of ceaseless struggle, chiefly against other plants, both akin and alien, through which all its features are molded.

The potency of environment in shaping organisms is still more clearly shown in desert lands. Here the strife for existence is chiefly between the organism on the one hand and the physical conditions of climate and soil on the other; here the plants strive to perpetuate their kind by individual longevity rather than by multiplication of offspring, so that with most species seeds are are reduced in number, while with some species fruiting becomes a disease, perhaps fatal; here

Saturday lecture in Assembly Hall of the United States National Museum, May 23, 1896. Delivered in the absence of the author by Mr. Frank Hamilton Cushing. 2 The first division of the address is a résumé of the earlier lectures of the series, especially of the five biologic addresses constituting the first course.

In

adaptive devices for checking evaporation and storing water, for protecting the plants from heat and cold, and for arming them against animal enemies, as well as for utilizing the energy of light, are developed; here all plants interact with the inorganic external in such manner that even unrelated species assume likeness in form and feature. desert lands the strife for existence is not between plant and plant, whether akin or alien, so much as against sun and sand; and most of the organisms engaged in this common strife are forced thereby into a cooperation in which each benefits the other and in which finally all are united in a great solidarity of singular perfection. So the organisms of desert lands, especially the plants, are modified by environment in the direction of likeness in external characters, and in other ways, and are forced into a cooperative union transcending specific and even generic kinship; and thereby the flora is in large measure transformed, and the potency of heredity is masked through the adjustment of the organisms to environment, while vegetal clanship is exalted into plant sociology. In humid and in arid lands alike heredity and environmental interaction are commonly antagonistic, and in this antagonism the strife for existence arises; but now and then, in the course of the development of organic forms, it chances that an organism enters an environment to which it is so peculiarly adapted that the struggle for existence is made easy through the conjunction of heredity with external relation, and in such instances the potency of vitality is strikingly shown. Such a case was that of the American buffalo which, about the time of transition of geologic modernity into historic antiquity, began to spread over the grass-covered plains of the mid-continent; so well adapted was his environment to his needs that his kind increased and multiplied a hundred fold; his rise was so rapid that he far outstripped enemies and expended his redundant energy in covering the hills and valleys with thousand-weights of moving flesh; but through generations of peace and sloth his vigor waned, his constitution weakened, and he fell an easy prey to the red man, and when the white man came he melted away helplessly. Commonly such spurts of vitality as that exemplified in the history of the buffalo result from human interference with the natural interaction of organisms. The European rabbit, when introduced in Australia, escaped the enemies and inimical factors of envi ronment which had grown up with the species in the original habitat, and soon increased beyond anticipation, almost beyond belief; the western American rabbit found his environment changed by the intro. duction of fields and stock, and increased enormously; the English sparrow, the common daisy of Britain, a roadside plant of Mexico, and many other organisms introduced in the United States artificially have profited by freedom from natural enemies and have multiplied into pests. So, in marts of world, and at various times in the history of t of org.isms, the redundance of vitality, when relieved se conditions, has been exemplified; and it

the devel from the

is under these favorable conditions that the potency of heredity is most conspicuous, since the organisms are not fain, as elsewhere and othertime, to expend energy in shaping themselves to their surroundings. The fertility of organisms in adaptive devices whereby they are fitted to adverse conditions of environment, shown clearly in the desert flora, is illustrated still more strikingly by certain insects. The walking sticks, the flying leaves, and a variety of creeping and leaping and winging insects adjust form and color to the vegetation on which they habitually rest so closely as to deceive enemies; stingless flies mimic the appearance and habits of stinging wasps and odorless insects counterfeit odoriferous bugs that they may escape molestation; and in many other ways insect species modify themselves for their own benefit under adverse conditions. The unrelated desert plants grow alike toward thorniness, waxiness, leaflessness, etc., to meet common needs, and thereby hereditary features are masked; but in insect mimicry the impress of heredity is lost and characters produced through direct interaction with environment replace legitimate features expressing biotic relation. Thereby the exceeding plasticity of the organism is displayed a plasticity so perfect as almost to suggest that the initial force operating through heredity is as nothing, and that environmental interaction is as everything, in shaping the course of the vital stream. The forest, the scant flora of the desert, the redundant vitality of species chancing to outstrip competitors, insect mimicry, all illustrate the potency of environment in determining the career of organisms considered as units, and indicate that primary characters are largely or perhaps wholly subordinate to derived organic characters produced by interaction with the external; and even when the organism is viewed as an aggregation of organs the same lesson may be read. The functionless splint bones of the horse are vestiges of digits which were useful organs in equine ancestors, as shown by the joint evidence of paleon tology, embryology, and reversion; the functionless and troublesome vermiform appendix is shown by Lucas to be a vestige of a supplemental stomach useful to an herbivorous progenitor, but useless through several later stages of development; the feeble vestigial muscle by which one man in a thousand, and one infant in a hundred, is able to move his ear is an all but functionless organ, weakened and nearly lost hrough disuse: and the dozen or more vestigial structures known in nan and the scores known in other organisms are but moribund war-iors in the strife for existence, thrown out of rank and trampled over ecause of unfitness for battle against the great external-they may Doast long lineage and noble station in the earlier stages of organic development, yet their past counts for nought in that ceaseless struggle which activity is life and inactivity is death. So among organs as mong organisms, many fall behind and are lost in the race for coninued existence, and it is environmental relation rather than original haracter that makes for perpetuity.