646 INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT UPON HUMAN INDUSTRIES. 



discouragingty luxuriant, not absolutely a desert, the same has been 

 true. The wild and cooperatively relentless wolves have become faith- 

 ful dogs. The capability was slumbering there. The feeble grasses are 

 transformed simply by giving the best a chance into prolific grains. 

 The modest wild flower becomes the florist's delight, landscape garden- 

 ing the composite expression of all aesthetic pleasures in form, color, 

 number, odor, and motion. Professor McGee has called our attention 

 to the partial desert as the best possible arena for starting certain forms 

 or epochs of this artificial life which we are now considering, and it is. 

 Indeed, in this perfectibility of the environment of which I am now 

 speaking it seems to be the manifest destiny, the natural proclivity, the 

 ambition of the desert to blossom as the rose. How delightful to con- 

 template this readiness of nature to respond to the touch of man. 



AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTS. 



It must have frequently occurred to my hearers that the more cir- 

 cumscribed the environment the more dependent the activity must be 

 upon it and therefore the more monotonous the life must have been. 

 This is true in the kingdoms of life and also true as among genera and 

 species of animals. It has been also true among the races of men. 

 The best examples, therefore, of environment affecting arts and indus- 

 tries will be found where the tribes are still living in the endogamic 

 stage of social culture, so that the happy arrangement between the 

 arts and their surroundings have been as little disturbed as possible. 

 Taking the Americas at the time when they were first revealed to the 

 historian you will find that they range through natural conditions 

 diversified enough to bring into prominence arts adapted to each cul- 

 ture area and obtrusively different from those of other areas. 1 



For our present purpose, there may be said to have been eighteen 

 American Indian environments or culture areas, to wit : Arctic, Atha- 

 pascan, Algonquian, Iroquoian, Muskhogean, Plains of the Great West, 

 North Pacific Coast, Columbia drainage, Interior Basin, California- 

 Oregon, Pueblo, Middle American, Antillean, South American Cordil- 

 leran, Andean Atlantic Slope, Eastern Brazilian, Central Brazilian, 

 Argentine-Patagonian, Fuegian. 2 These will be given seriatim with the 

 factors constituting the motives and processes of the arts of life. A 

 table will follow with the factors at the top. By writing the character- 

 istics of each factor for each environment you would have at a glance 



'These culture areas should he compared with Major Powell's linguistic map, 7tli 

 An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., with Thomas's mound maps, 12th An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., with 

 Bancroft's geographic areas in his Native Races of the Pacific States, hut especially 

 with Franz Boas's Anthropology of the North American Indians, Mon. Iuternat. Coug. 

 ofAnthrop., Chicago; C. Hart Merriam's Geographic Distribution of Life in North 

 America, Smithsonian Report, 1891, and J. A. Allen's Geographic Distribution of 

 North American Mammals, Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., New York, Vol. IV. 



2 See Powell (J. W.), 7th An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol.; Brinton (D. G.), The American 

 Race, New York, 1891. 



