Science Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

Tylor is doing that very 19th-century thing: turning a practical workaround into a cultural tell. On its surface, the line is an innocuous observation about stilt houses. Underneath, it’s a miniature manifesto for his broader project as an early anthropologist: habits congeal into “taste,” and once they do, they stop needing their original justification.

The sentence is engineered to naturalize a particular way of explaining culture. “First forced upon” signals environmental determinism - geography compels behavior. Then comes the pivot: “afterwards followed as a matter of taste,” where necessity hardens into preference, tradition, even identity. That shift matters. It suggests culture is partly inertia: people keep doing what worked, then retrofit meanings onto it until it feels chosen rather than inherited. Tylor’s syntax performs that glide from constraint to aesthetics, making the transformation sound smooth, almost inevitable.

The Holland comparison is doing quiet imperial work. By invoking a European example, Tylor reassures his Victorian reader that what might be dismissed as “primitive” is actually legible and familiar: the Dutch build with water in mind, too. It’s an argument for continuity across societies, but also a way to domesticate difference - to translate other people’s architecture into a European frame.

Contextually, this fits Tylor’s evolutionist moment: culture as a sequence where earlier adaptations persist as “survivals.” The line isn’t just about piles; it’s about how history hides inside taste, and how “choice” often arrives after the fact.