CAVE DWELLINGS PEWKES. 633 



A study of the cliff dwellings of the Old and New Worlds while 

 showing, on the one hand, that surroundings have exerted marked 

 influences in history, reveals on the other the weakness of the posi- 

 tion that human history is solely a product of environment. If we 

 were dealing with organic structures alone and the mind of man were 

 wholly subservient to them, cave men throughout the world would 

 have a greater uniformity in culture, but there is another factor in 

 the case, there is the human mind and will with its powers of over- 

 coming environment, and there is in man a strong desire for socio- 

 logical and therefore institutional development. Man's mind, 

 especially in the higher stages, is not altogether plastic to conditions ; 

 the desire to live in families, tribes, and other groupings is strong 

 enough to offset climate and physicial conditions or to modify their 

 influences as man wishes. Animals also have gregarious instincts, 

 but these have not overcome environmental influence. Primitive 

 man is also more or less subservient to it, but civilized man rises above 

 external conditions, creating for himself sociologic and institutional 

 laws independent of his surroundings. 



It is evident that while cave life has exerted a marked influence 

 on natural man in the creation of the monumental habit of building 

 and thus led to higher civilization, this habit is only one influence 

 acting on human culture history. The higher culture of man is 

 more complex and due to more complicated influences than this 

 would imply. History is the result of external environment, geolog- 

 ical and climatic, but this cause is not the only influence acting on 

 man's mind through the centuries. Wliether we approach our sub- 

 ject from the historical, the cultural, or the geographical side we can 

 not overlook the psychic or mind element in culture. It is instruc- 

 tive to see how in different regions of the earth natural man has 

 been similarly influenced by like environment in constructing habi- 

 tations, that limited influence from its nature is not lasting although 

 in a measure hereditary but it will ultimately be powerless. Simi- 

 larities of cave dwellings in widely separated geographical localities 

 mean that the human mind in early conditions is practically the 

 same everywhere, a principle that has the support of psychology. 

 In later conditions the mind of the individual, while not necessarily 

 superior to that of earlier times, enjoys the influence of accumulated 

 survivals or the race inheritance of centuries of thought of other 

 minds called culture. 



Note. — Since the delivery of the above address several pamphlets 

 and one or two books have been published on related subjects; the 

 most important of the latter is by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould, on 

 " Cliff Castles and Cave-dwellings of Europe." Among many in- 

 structive examples of European troglodytes, mentioned by the author 

 of this work, the caves of Balmes du Montbrun near S. Jean de Cen- 



