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Somewhat the same lesson may be learnt by comparing the older and ruder kinds of fortification and siege with those of modern times. Tribes at the level of the Kamchatkans and the North American Indians knew how to fortify their villages with embankments and palisades. In ancient Egypt and Assyria and neighbouring countries, strong and high fortress-walls and towers were defended by archers and slingers, and attacked by storming-parties with scaling-ladders. Old sieges were unscientific, as is so curiously seen in the Homeric poems, where the Greeks encamp over against Troy, but seem to have no notion of regularly investing it, much less of attack by sap and trench. The Greeks and Romans came on to use higher art in fortification and siege, and there appear among them machines of war such as the ancient battering-ram, heavy and skilfully engineered, while contrivances of the nature of huge bows like the catapult led up to the cannon of later ages which superseded them.

Lastly, looking at the army system as it is in our modern world, one favourable change is to be noticed. The employment of foreign mercenary troops, which almost through the whole stretch of historical record has been a national evil alike in war and peace, is at last dying out. It is not so with the system of standing armies which drain the life and wealth of the world on a scale more enormous even than in past times, and stand as the great obstacle to harmony between nations. The student of politics can but hope that in time the pressure of vast armies kept on a warfooting may prove unbearable to the European nations which maintain them, and that the time may come when the standing army may shrink to a nucleus ready for the exigencies of actual war if it shall arise, while serving in peace time as a branch of the national police.

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Dwellings :-Caves, 229-Huts, 230-Tents, 231-Houses, 231-Stone and Brick Building, 232—Arch, 235-Development of Architec ture, 235. ress :-Painting skin, 236-Tattooing, 237-Deformation of Skull, &c., 240-Ornaments, 241-Clothing of Bark, Skin, &c., 244-Mats, 246-Spinning, Weaving, 246-Sewing, 249-Garments, 249. Navigation-Floats, 252-Boats, 253

Rafts, 255—Outriggers, 255-Paddles and Oars, 256-Sails, 256— Galleys and Ships, 257.

We have next to examine the dwellings of mankind. Thinking of the nests of birds, the dams of beavers, the tree-platforms of apes, it can scarcely be supposed that man at any time was unable to build himself a shelter. That he does not always do so is mostly because while on the move from place to place he may be content to sleep in the open, or take to the natural shelter of a tree or rock. Thus in the Andaman Islands the roving savages have been noticed to resort to the sea-shore, where, under some overhanging cliff that kept off the wind, they would scoop themselves out each a hole in the sand to lie in. Rockshelters under the cliffs were in Europe the resort of the ancient savages, as is proved by the bones and flint flakes and other remains that are found lying there in the ground.

Caves are ready-made houses for beast or man. It has been already mentioned (p. 31) how in such countries as England and France, caverns were the abodes of the old tribes of the reindeer and mammoth period, and the Bushmen of South Africa are a modern example of rude tribes thus given to dwelling in caves in the rocks. But caverns are so convenient, that they are now and then still used in the civilized world, and most of us have seen some cave in a cliff forming the back of a fisherman's cottage, or at least a storehouse. It is not so much with these natural dwellings that we are here concerned as with artificial structures, however rude, set up by man for his shelter.

In the depths of Brazilian forests, travellers have come upon the dwellings of the naked Puris, which are not even huts, only sloping screens made by setting up a row of huge palm-leaves some eight feet long, leaning against a crosspole. Being put up to windward, this shelters the lazy Indian as he lolls in his hammock slung between two trees, and with the dense foliage overhead life is not comfortless on fine days, though in bad weather the family and dogs have to crouch defenceless round the wood fire on the ground. Even in these tropical forests, what is generally met with is a real hut, though it may be such a rude one as the Botocudos make with these same great palm-leaves, sticking a number of them with their stalks in the ground in a circle, and bringing their points together, so as to form a roof overhead. The Patachos go to work more artificially, bending together young growing trees and poles stuck in the ground, so that by binding their tops together they form a framework which is then thatched over with large leaves. Much the same lesson in primitive architecture may be learnt from the natives of Australia, among whom a party camping out will be content to set up a line of leafy boughs

in the ground to form a screen or breakwind for the night; but when they take the pains to interlace such boughs over. head, the screen becomes a hut, and where they stay for a while they will make a regular framework of branches, covering them in with sheets of bark, or leaves and grass, and even laying on sods or daubing the outside with clay. The invention of the simple round hut is thus easily understood. It is plain, too, how a conical hut, when roving tribes like the American Indians carry from place to place its poles and skins or sheets of bark, becomes in fact a portable tent, and this shows how tents came to be invented. The more cultured herdsmen of the East carry for their tent-coverings sheets of felted hair or wool, and we ourselves use for temporary shelter tents of canvas. Indeed one has only to look at the common bell-tent of the soldier to see that it is a transformed savage hut. Now the circular hut, whether beehive or conical, is low to creep into and small to lie or crouch in. More room is often got by digging the earth out some feet deep within, but a greater improvement in construction is to raise the hut itself on posts or a wall, so that what was at first the whole house now becomes the roof. Thus is built the round hut with its side-posts filled in with wattle and mud, or its solid earthen wall carrying the thatched roof which may reach beyond in shady eaves. Such were in ancient times common peasants' dwellings in Europe, as they still are in other quarters of the world, and indeed we perhaps keep up a memory of them in the round thatched summer-houses in our gardens, which are curiously like the real huts of barbarians. Next, as African travellers remark, one great sign of higher civilization is when people begin to build their houses square-cornered instead of round. The circular hut to be easily built must be small, and room is best gained by building the house oblong, with a ridge

pole along the roof where the sloping poles from the sides meet. By being able to build to any required length, it became possible for many families, often twenty, to live together in village-houses as rude peoples often do. In barbaric countries spacious houses are built with the roofs carried on lofty posts with cross-timbers, or on solid walls of earth or stones; in fact they are constructed on much the same principles as our modern houses, though more rudely.

It does not seem difficult to make out how stone and

brick architecture came into use. Where wood is scarce, men readily take to building walls of stones, turf, or earth. Thus the Australians are known to build shelters by heaping up loose stones as a wall, and roofing with sticks laid across. Rough stones, though they make good embankments and low walls, would be too unsteady for high walls, except slaty and stratified slabs which form natural building-stones. With mere stones out of the ground dwellings would hardly be built of a higher kind than the curious beehivehouses of the Hebrides, whose small rudely vaulted chambers are formed by the piled stones overlapping inwards till they almost meet above, and covered in with growing turf, so that they look like grassy hillocks with passages for the dwellers to creep in. This primitive building is very ancient, and though such houses are no longer made, the old ones still serve as shealings in summer. The ancient Scotch underground dwellings or "weems," (i.e. caves) have chambers of rough stones, and remind antiquaries of Tacitus' account of the caves dug by the ancient Germans and heaped over with dirt, where they stored their grain and took refuge themselves from the cold, and in time of war from the enemy. When the craft of the mason is brought in, buildings of a higher order begin. The stones may at first be merely trimmed to fit one another like the

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