Niche

“ Properties measured in lower atmospheric niches will include a wide range of parameters -pressure, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, wind speed, rainfall, atmospheric components, etc. Each property will have its measured values processed within the three-dimensional niche in a useful niche-dependent manner. This may be used to extract data showing, for example, the average rainfall in a niche area, its gradient toward niche boundaries, patchiness of the rainfall pattern, and higher-order characteristics. ”

“ But if anything emerges from the study in which we have been engaged, it is surely this fact: that wherever there is a niche in nature capable of sustaining life, to that niche some animal will sooner or later adapt itself without any reference to man’s desires or interests. ”

“ If the concept of a niche is to be efficient its boundaries should be essentially independent of its major properties, although property dependent niches could also be very use ful. Lower atmospheric niches are time-varying in size and location, constantly appearing, disappearing, and merging. The size of each niche will depend partly on the complexity of the atmospheric region and partly on requirements for effective monitoring or modeling. ”

“ Then, however, other businessmen, real businessmen, would want the same niche, and the marketing people would muscle in and set the tone. Or, as with some new companies, they might have been setting the tone from the very start. ”

“ The arrangement of these niches is very happily managed, so as to avoid any monotony in the range of twelve similar niches; for, besides the natural division formed by the small attached shafts between the figures, an additional projecting shaft in every third division forms the tier into four large bays with three figures in each. The capitals of these niches are remarkable, the graceful foliage being disposed in a very free manner, in some cases growing upwards, in others bent down, but always true to the outline of the capital. ”

“ There are niches in the walls in several places, from which pictures have been dug, and these niches are often adorned with elegant masques, figures and animals, which have been left by the ignorant or careless workmen, and which are going fast to destruction. ”

“ It is not worth while to give an extended analysis of its redundant details which, with its vast chimneys adorned with free-standing orders, niches, panelled surfaces, and pinnacles; its dormers with overlaid orders of pilasters, pediments, scrolls, and endless filigree ornaments; and its great lantern with inverted consoles on entablatures forming flying-buttresses (where there is nothing to be buttressed) , make up a bewildering complex without structural meaning or artistic merit. ”

“ But the order of nature does not always exactly correspond with the classification of the naturalist. His system must necessarily be precise, formal, and defined. One tribe ends off abruptly, and is immediately succeeded by another, with different functions and structure, and dignified with a separate name. But in the order of creation, such abrupt demarcations are few, for if they exist in the present economy, they can not unfrequently be filled up from the existences of the past. ”

“ The industry of the people seemed more like the habits of birds building their nests on every point of vantage, or of bees constructing their precious combs in the trunks of old trees or in the clefts of the rocks, than the industry of human creatures, which requires some little "verge and scope" for its manifestations. ”

“ Its mighty growth of thistles and centauries draws them all to me from everywhere around. Never, in my insect-hunting memories, have I seen so large a population at a single spot; all the trades have [216] made it their rallying-point. Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay, weavers of cotton goods, collectors of pieces cut from a leaf or the petals of a flower, architects in paste-board, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, workers in goldbeater’s skin, and many more. ”

“ But a race, once produced, is no more a fixed and immutable entity than the stock whence it sprang; variations arise among its members, and as these variations are transmitted like any others, new races may be developed out of the pre-existing ones ad infinitum, or, at least, within any limit at present determined. Given sufficient time and sufficiently careful selection, and the multitude of races which may arise from a common stock is as astonishing as are the extreme structural differences which they may present. ”

“ The Nix looked round and round about her. Below lay the sea, moaning and washing the shore, and not far off was the outline of the little graveyard in the faint starlight. She ran on along the cliffs, for far away a few lights of the town by the river’s mouth could be seen twinkling in a row, and she knew that up that river lay the mill. As morning dawned she found herself in a thick wood. She was glad, for what she had seen of people made her wish to get as far from them as possible, and she determined to hide all day in the wood, and travel on all night. ”

“ But what can we say about human beings in a mine, about the practicability of keeping human twenty-five hundred men in a hole in the ground? And how can a mine-owner reach down to the men in the hole, make himself felt as a human being on the bottom floor of the hole in the ground? ”

“ She gestured toward the stream and the cultivated forest.
“Your world moves at the pace of a walk, Niaga; with our machines, you could rise above your trees, reach your destination in minutes—when now it takes you days.” ”

“ Tracts made inaccessible to man and at the same time more fertile. Some speculator comes and dams up the stream below, and lo! the water stands over all meadows, making impassable morasses and dead trees for fish hawks,—a wild, stagnant, fenny country, the last gasp of wildness before it yields to the civilization of the factory,—to cheer the eyes of the factory people and educate them. It makes a little wilderness above the factories.
The woodbine now begins to hang red about the maples and other trees. ”

“ That form also of property was, in this the lowest stage of human society, understood and acted upon. If a man had fortified a cave against the entrance of wild beasts, or had built a hut, or wigwam, that did not belong to the tribe, but to himself, as much so as the burrow, or lair, or nest, an animal forms for itself, is its own. ”

“ What the trapper was to the fur trade, the prospector was to the mining era that ushered civilization into the wilds with a blare of dance-halls and wine and wassail and greed. Ragged, poor, roofless, grubstaked by 'pardner' or outfitter on a basis of half profit, the prospector stands as the eternal type of the trail-maker for finance. ”

“ They can scarcely be said to have any idea as to property in lands, though the tribe may lay claim to certain hunting-grounds as their own. As soon as the organization of gens arose, we can see that it would affect their ideas of property. The gens, we must remember, was the unit of their social organization. ”

“ We shall now see an instance of development operating within the production of what approaches to the character of variety of species. It is fully established that a human family, tribe, or nation, is liable, in the course of generations, to be either advanced from a mean form to a higher one, or degraded from a higher to a lower, by the influence of the physical conditions in which it lives. ”

“ It has been an evolution which, beginning with a tribe whose members severally perform the same actions each for himself, ends with a civilized community whose members severally perform different actions for each other; and an evolution which has transformed the solitary producer of any one commodity into a combination of producers who, united under a master, take separate parts in the manufacture of such commodity. ”

“ What the economic evolution has been we do not exactly know. Little credit is given to-day to the old division into the three successive stages of hunting, pastoral nomadism, and agriculture. This was not yet so in 1884, when Dargun could still write: “The evolutionary stages of hunting, pastoral, and agricultural life are so well established in science as stages of human evolution in general, that it seems rather audacious to object to this division. ”

“ Industries varied in different tribes, one being skilled in basket-making, another in stone implements for warfare and domestic use, another in pottery, another in boats, and still another in certain kinds of clothing—especially the ornaments made from precious stones or bone. This made it possible to spread the culture of one group to other groups, and later there developed the wandering peddler who went from tribe to tribe trading and swapping goods. ”

“ I would also plead the poverty of our British Fauna in the sub-class, and my almost entire ignorance of exotic Phalænæ. Even supposing myself acquainted with all our indigenous species, they will barely furnish a systematist with a clew to the truth: you may pick up a single link of a chain, yet fail to discover the length of that chain, or the situation in that chain which the link originally possessed. ”

“ In their barter between the different tribes, and in estimating their wealth, the blanket is generally the unit of value, and the hiaqua, a long white shell obtained off Cape Flattery at a considerable depth, is also extensively used for money, its value increasing with its length. ”

“ Many people raise a good crop of cocoons without knowing much more than we do—sometimes not as much. I was only telling you the possibilities of the industry if one were to pursue it on a large scale. ”

“ Yet, we have from time to time brought to notice differentiations in the trait-complexes for different parts of these economic areas, suggesting that a close examination of a large series of traits will result in a somewhat different grouping. A perusal of the literature of our subject shows it to be customary to divide the two continents into fifteen culture areas, each conceived to be the home of a distinct type of culture. ”

“ The developments under scrutiny affect surviving pre-literate societies-the nomadic, animistic population of Sudan, the tribes of the Brazilian Amazon forests, remote populations of Africa, Asia, Australia-as they affect the literate and post- literate. Without going into the details of the process, we should be aware that commodities coming from such societies, including the commodity of labor, no less than their needs and expectations, are traded on the global market. ”

“ Such occurrences are very common among almost all classes of rural Americans. Sometimes it is to discover treasure on the individual’s lands, or in the neighbourhood; sometimes a mine, and sometimes an Indian, a trapper, a pirate, or a revolutionary deposit. ”

“ These are the traits below the heavy line that steps up and down across the diagram. A minority of traits—those above the heavy line—are local to the several areas. On the basic principle that a trait occurring over a continuous territory may be assumed to have originated but once and to have spread by diffusion, the bulk of the culture of most of the areas must have come into them from outside. ”

“ Individuals, that correspond to our conception of an individual man, combine and form stocks and colonies, with division of labour. We find this in the medusæ, corals, anemones, tunicates, and vermalians. One of these animal stocks, to which our human social combinations only correspond in a much wider sense, gives us a stage that is represented by the tree in the plant-world. Infinite perspectives open out, and also infinite complications. Infinite 212problems spring up for morphology to deal with ”

“ Every morning you may see a hundred and fifty to two hundred ploughs issue from both establishments; these spread over the plain and till an immense expanse of land. Carts drawn by bullocks, big mules, or superb horses are ceaselessly exporting the products of the fields, the meadows, or the orchards. ”

“ In view of these considerations, and the new methods of classification, such as grouping genera into families or orders, and these into sub-orders, tribes, sub-tribes, etc., we can readily understand why the great Harvard Professor should have wholly eliminated community of descent from his idea of "species," or hesitated to regard varieties otherwise than as the result of man's agency.
Indeed, the whole question of species, as well as varieties, is likely to undergo material modifications in the future. ”

“ They also manufacture, according to their aboriginal art, both for their own consumption, and for the purpose of traffic, a species of earthenware not much inferior to the coarse crockery of our common potters. ”

“ We use the term “commercial tribes” in a wide sense, as including not only those tribes among which many people subsist by trading, but those that exchange a considerable part of their produce for foreign merchandise. For instance, a tribe that grows corn for export is a commercial tribe in the sense we attach to the word. ”

“ A subsidiary resource is to point out the kind's nearest natural affinities. For instance, in the binary Nomenclature of Botany and of Zoology, the name of every species consists of the name of the natural group next above, with a word added expressive of some quality in the nature or mode of discovery, or what not, of the particular species itself. ”

“ The land dealers ought to know the market facilities, the extent of capital and credit required for success on a particular piece of land and in a particular locality. As a matter of fact, dealers of the type under discussion do not warn the settlers. They give advice of an optimistic character and they apply to the settler the Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest. ”

“ With the limitations thus indicated the identification of mound-building peoples as distinct tribes or stocks is a legitimate study, but when we consider the further fact now established, that arts extend beyond the boundaries of linguistic stocks, the most fundamental divisions we are yet able to make of the peoples of the globe, we may more properly conclude that this field promises but a meager harvest ”