THE DWELLING HOUSE 



to make brick; while the Teutonic dwellers in the 

 north, surrounded by forests, built their houses of 

 wood. Even the very wealthy in these lands in times 

 past had little choice in their building-materials, and 

 while no such restriction is placed upon the very wealthy 

 to-day, the generality of people the world over still 

 build their houses of the material nearest to hand. 



It is always true that the farther we go back in the 

 history of an art the more simple and direct are the 

 forces that we find attending its development. How 

 close the savage lived to the primitive powers of nature 

 is scarcely realized by members of civilized society. 

 His life is directly molded by geography, geology, and 

 climate. His art is created from suggestions given by 

 his own environment, interpreted and applied according 

 to the powers of his intelligence. Thus we find the 

 aborigines of wild forest-belts building their huts of 

 log platforms with a wall of interlaced branches on the 

 windward side alone; we find Arctic hunting tribes- 

 such as the Eskimos of Kamchatka forced by the 

 cold to hang the skins of animals on the walls of their 

 conical dwellings. 



In the architecture of the cliff-dwellers we have a 

 fine example of the utilization of natural opportuni- 

 ties. The southwestern portion of the United States 

 is known to the geologist as the " plateau country." 

 Its dominant formation is the mesa, or flat mountain- 

 top, furrowed by chasms varying greatly in breadth. 

 The walls of these gorges are perpendicular, rising 

 from ten to a hundred feet in height. At their feet 

 lie rich alluvial lands deposited by receding floods. 



