Come ice and cover the fields, that after planting they may yield abundantly;
Let all hearts be glad;
The knowing ones will assemble in four days;
They will encircle the village dancing and singing their lays * * *
That moisture may come in abundance.”
I have limited myself to showing that the arid climatic conditions are reflected from the rites of one tribe of Indians, and it would be instructive to see whether these facts are of importance from the comparative side. There are other equally arid regions of the globe where we might justly look for the same results if this climatic condition is as powerful in the modification of cults as implied. There are marked similarities in the climate of Arabia, of Peru, and of Assyria, and as a consequence startling resemblances in their rituals. But there are many differences; and we thus detect that our analyses of causes has not been complete or ultimate, for we have limited it to but one powerful element in the modifications of ceremonials.
Environment is a complicated nexus of influences, organic and inorganic, threads of which we can successfully trace a certain distance, but which eludes as we go further. There are many effects where causes remain to be discovered, and many climatic influences on cults have yet to be clearly discerned.
A few words more and I have done. Theories among civilized men, like things among savages, may become fetishes. It would be lamentable if environment should become a word to conjure with, or if we should use it to cover ignorance of that which we can not explain. I have tried to show that one highly complicated ritual is so plastic that it responds to climatic conditions, but there are elements in it due to some other unknown cause. Because climatic conditions explain certain modifications in human culture the tendency would be to strive to make it do duty in explaining all. Such a generalization is premature and unscientific. The theory that differences of species of animals and plants were due to climatic influences may have satisfied the early students of evolution before Charles Darwin pointed out the law of natural selection. Environment is a factor which profoundly affects animals, but a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive is a law of evolution.
So environment is a potent influence on the culture of man, but there are laws, as yet not clearly made out, back of it which control the evolution of man.