The once-celebrated Lake Dwellers of Switzerland evidently lived after a similar fashion.
In this case insects drive human beings into trees, but there are instances where nobler animals have produced the same effect.
Some years ago there lived in Southern Africa a powerful chief called Moselekatze, who spent his whole life in warfare, converting all the male inhabitants into soldiers, dividing them into regiments, ruling them with the extreme of discipline, and by their aid devastating the neighbouring countries. He swept off all the cattle, which constitutes the wealth of the Kafir tribes, and either killed the male inhabitants or pressed them into his service.
The land was in consequence deprived of its natural defenders, and the wild beasts, especially the lions, increased rapidly, so that the position of the survivors was a really terrible one. They had no cattle to furnish the milk which is the chief food of the Kafir tribes; their weapons had been taken by Moselekatze; and they were forced to live almost entirely on locusts and wild plants. By degrees the lions became so numerous and daring, that the slight Kafir huts were an insufficient protection during the night, and the disarmed and half-starved inhabitants were perforce obliged to make their habitations in trees.
Dr. Moffat, the well-known missionary, saw one tree in which there were no less than twenty huts. They were conical, and made of sticks and grass, the base resting upon a platform or scaffold laid upon the fork of a horizontal branch. The only mode of approach to these huts was by notches cut in the trunk of the tree.
How needful were these precautions was shown by the fact that the missionary himself spent a night in one of these aërial huts, and had the pleasure of hearing a number of lions snarl and growl all night over a rhinoceros hump which he had placed in an oven made of a deserted ant-hill. The oven, however, was too hot for the lions, and they had to retreat at daylight.
Passing from the tropics to the polar regions, we now take an instance where man has acknowledgedly copied an animal in the construction of his dwelling.
In Esquimaux-land, where no trees can grow, where for months together the sun never rises above the horizon, where the temperature is many degrees below zero, and where the land and ice are alike covered with a mantle of snow so thick that every landmark is abolished, it would seem that no human beings could support life for one week. There is neither timber for house-building nor wood for fuel, so that shelter, warmth, and cookery seem to be equally impossible, and as these are among the prime necessities of human life, it is not easy to see how mankind could exist.
Yet these very regions are inhabited by sundry animals, and it is by copying them that Man can keep his place. We have already seen how the Esquimaux hunter copies the Polar Bear, and we have now to see how he copies the Seal in the material and form of his dwelling-house, and not only contrives to live, but to enjoy life all the more for the singular conditions in which he is placed. Captain Hall mentions, in his “Life with the Esquimaux,” that one of the natives, named Kudlago, who was returning to his native country after visiting the United States, died while on board the ship. Towards the end of his life he was yearning for ice, and his last intelligible words were, “Do you see ice? Do you see ice?”