THE RELATION OF INSTITUTIONS TO ENVIRONMENT. 709 



and the sire or dam is the ruler thereof, and the young are led toward 

 right and held from wrong according to the lights of the ruler, and 

 thus social organization and ethical control arise together; in the 

 human genus, sapient species, and Seri family the parental group 

 appears to have grown into the clan in which the mother is householder, 

 though the doughtiest warrior or shrewdest juggler is leader and law- 

 giver and controls his kin by fear, largely for selfish ends, while the body 

 of common law changes materially with each succession in chiefship; 

 in the Piman family andPapago tribe, the closer blood ties are strong, 

 though the clan system is feeble, and the ruler is chosen for wisdom as 

 well as courage, and is advised by a council of wise men and aided by 

 subchiefs, each similarly guided by the old men of his village, and thus 

 the government is beneficent according to the lights of the sages, and 

 the body of law, albeit unwritten, is handed down from generation to 

 generation with little change. So property right and jurisdiction arise 

 among the more intelligent lower animals and spread widely among the 

 peaceful Papago, whose unwritten laws are like unto the written laws 

 of enlightened nations in beneficence of aim; and as justice blossoms 

 and bears fruit in beneficent custom, provinces and clans and gentes 

 wane and confederation waxes, and the governmental institution grows 

 large and clear. Thus it is that the higher stages of organization begin 

 with family rule and pass into civics — a series of institutions embody- 

 ing the justice of wisdom, the mercy of humanity, and the strength of 

 a union which transcends the harsh enmity of sun and sand and makes 

 the wilderness to blossom — institutions only a little less firmly fixed 

 because limned on the tablets of memory and linked through song and 

 story, rather than graved on brass or printed in books. 



Of such are the results flowing from the strife of the desert. The 

 plants, animals, and men are forced into cooj)eration so intimate that 

 few live unto themselves alone, most live for the general good; then, 

 stimulated by the severity of the strife, cooperation begets intelligence 

 which dominates the desert for the common good; thenceforth intelli- 

 gence guides the communality, commensality, and miscigenesis from 

 which it springs, and produces definite organizations of the organisms 

 which are best for the most intelligent but good for all; and in time the 

 organization matures in institutions binding the humans directly but 

 at the same time binding the subhumans indirectly and uniting human 

 and subhuman in a grander unity — the unity of intelligent life in a single 

 nature-shaping power. The course of development is unbroken from 

 lowly shrub to ruler of a principality, and from simple tolerance between 

 shrub and mouse to beneficent law; and throughout the course from 

 lowly beginning to noble ending, a single mode prevails — it is not so 

 much the elimination of the unfit (for this is the cruel work of ruthless 

 nature) as the combination of the fit into superorganic groups of ever- 

 rising grade. So the bitter strife of the desert makes strongly for indi- 

 vidual strength, but still more strongly for altruism with its attendant 



