PES Lf IX CO ES Pf LS A A Ae DF om det Rome bho WLS. ai CF Moe PPA P IEEE PRE AED PS 2S PESO EPPS aE eee cAx a ~ 4s ha eee, Las rete rite ie el noe Ae ee Acs s sae ee, ee 4 Seo See 524 rs ae EIN, eer “a SA mae PE EEO LLL Sgt oo se is = piers oy oO ee a OF re a me SS ee, or S oe ? SA Se te ee a eA ~ Leon mah oe ae eka, x Sere erate en SN re Sy mee ee hh te RAGA, ti te, th te Pa 2 Bn LEER ASA AS As “ ~~ on & A DD Me Ba Bt tm Seo Bn Be Oe a, TS AO LEDERER EEL EONAR DALAL SDD DORAL DER EE nee Senna nanan eon SES, Note war eres On th ta hata tata Pot torsion ton Po CLE REE EEE EE OE nth hat MES, ‘55 it CN ae art 2S eS ae oe tt TF eee ee I ete tote eter ee LL IE A tag tae a ae a Oe LLB tacit hh ase gage anne megan : Bt EEE, CPAs eS te A, HL EES to ano PO hata te, te tn to Dba te tea tn toto, ee aera SOLS EOLOO oe is Rh thee te te he ee OE EO ta Sa ton Dn th tata tn Da bo, tos ta Sry tote! ES FEE AO ES BES EPL ES, rr AS AAS OK ee ta ke A Pee OTE LER ELIOT eh SIS Pees ee Lr eT tae DS ODDIE tata ton A ge Na PS Sta a Dee er eee PROTO POO CEL I I OMIT SASS, eee eS hae Re de hh te te tt PSOE PEE COD Sa : acces TOO RANI a ae ri noh tasty SSR AA 5 Se A ORLA Ee tad 5 Se ee tee are SARA AIT TOTO CPA REAR IEEE ESS PLLA I II OIOO TCT SOSA RELL “a —_ ba é +S aK ¥ my ah ye rey vA russ “ fy o" . 7 THE EARTH MODIFIED BY HUMAN ACTION A LAST REVISION OF “MAN AND NATURE” BY ‘ GEORGE P. MARSH ** Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world have done s0 much to revolutionize the earth as MAN, the power of an endless life, has done since the day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it.”—H. BusHNELL, Sermon on the Power of an Endless Life. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1907 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by CHARLES SCRIBNER, In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. VUPYRIGHT, 1874, BY SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO. CopyRIGHT, 1884, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS. CORN TS. CHAPTER L PAGE {NTRODUCTORY, F 5 - 2 A . ° 7 F 1 CHAPTER II. TRANSFER, MODIFICATION, AND EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLE AND OF ANIMAL SPECIES, . : - : é ‘ moO CHAPTER III. THE Woops, F ; ; ‘ : : ; ‘ : . 146 CHAPTER IV. THE WATERS, ° - . : : F ; ; , . 387 CHAPTER V. THE SANDS, , ; : J 5 : * 3 : . 525 CHAPTER VI. GREAT PROJECTS OF PHYSICAL CHANGE ACCOMPLISHED OR PRO- POSED BY MAN, 4 : : ‘ “ : ‘ 4 . 584 - juried 5 : ny bi? ‘ a Ao 7 eee vite os er ‘i sah vie PUBLISHERS’ NOTE. Tux profound interest felt in his subject by the author of this work, induced him to devote to a careful revision of it all that portion of the last year of his life which his official duties and his failing strength left at his command. Every new book within his reach, bearing in any way on the topics treated in this volume, was faithfully consulted, every opportunity for personal observa- tion conscientiously seized; and, although neither leisure nor health permitted so full a use of these works, nor so frequent re- course to the great book of Nature, as was desired, yet, whenever a new argument or a new fact led to the modification of a previously expressed opinion, such modification has been frankly made. On the whole, however, it will be seen that the author’s genéral conclusions remain unchanged, and his conviction of the vital importance to the future of our race of a wiser economy, on the part of the present and rising generation, in the use of Nature’s gifts, was only deepened and strengthened by the study and ob- servation of every additional year of his life. The hope of impressing, in some degree, this conviction upon the minds of those in whose hands the practical value of his sug- gestions lies, was the inspiring motive of the work in its begin- ning, and the motive which continued to animate the writer to the last day of his earthly life, a considerable portion of that day being devoted by him to the completion of this revision. (v) PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. Tue object of the present volume is: to indicate the character and, approximately, the extent of the changes produced by hu- man action in the physical conditions of the globe we inhabit ; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of cau- tion in all operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the inorganic world ; to suggest the possibility and the importance of the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvement of waste and exhausted regions; and, incidentally, to illustrate the doctrine that man is, in both kind and degree, a power of a higher order than any of the other forms of animated life, which, like him, are nourished at the table of bounteous nature. In the rudest stages of life man depends upon spontaneous animal and vegetable growth for food and clothing, and his con- sumption of such products consequently diminishes the numerical abundance of the species which serve his uses. At more ad- vanced periods, he protects and propagates certain esculent vege- tables and certain fowls and quadrupeds, and, at the same time, he wars upon rival organisms which prey upon these objects of his care or obstruct the increase of their numbers. Hence the action of man upon the organic world tends to derange its orig- inal balances, and while it reduces the numbers of some species, or even extirpates them altogether, it multiplies other forms of animal and vegetable life. The extension of agricultural and pastoral industry involves (vii) Vili PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. an enlargement of the sphere of man’s domain, by encroachment upon the forests which once covered the greater part of the earth’s surface otherwise adapted to his occupation. The felling of the woods has been attended with momentous consequences to the drainage of the soil, to the external configuration of its sur- face, and probably also to local climate; and the importance of human life as a transforming power is, perhaps, more clearly de- monstrable in the influence man has thus exerted upon super- ficial geography than in any other result of his material effort. Lands won from the woods must be both drained and irrigated ; river-banks and maritime coasts must be secured by means of ar- tificial bulwarks against inundation by inland and by ocean floods ; and the needs of commerce require the improvement of natural and the construction of artificial channels of navigation. Thus man is compelled to extend over the unstable waters the empire he had already founded upon the solid land. The upheaval of the bed of seas and the movements of water and of wind expose vast deposits of sand, which occupy space re- quired for the convenience of man, and often, by the drifting of their particles, overwhelm the fields of human industry with in- vasions as disastrous as the incursions of the ocean. On the other hand, on many coasts, sand-hills both protect the shores from erosion by the waves and currents, and shelter valuable grounds from blasting sea-winds. Man, therefore, must sometimes resist, sometimes promote, the formation and growth of dunes, and sub- ject the barren and flying sands to the same obedience to his will to which he has reduced other forms of terrestrial surface. Besides these old and comparatively familiar methods of mate- rial improvement, modern ambition aspires to yet grander achieve- ments in the conquest of physical nature, and projects are medi- tated which quite eclipse the boldest enterprises hitherto under- taken for the modification of geographical surface. The natural character of the various fields where human indus- try has: effected revolutions so important, and where the multi- PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. ix plying population and the impoverished resources of the globe demand new triumphs of mind over matter, suggests a corre- sponding division of the general subject, and I have conformed the distribution of the several topics to the chronological succes- sion in which man must be supposed to have extended his sway over the different provinces of his material kingdom. [I have, then, in the introductory chapter, stated, in a comprehensive way, the general effects and the prospective consequences of hu- man action upon the earth’s surface and the life which peoples it. This chapter is followed by four others in which I have traced the history of man’s industry as exerted upon Animal and Vegetable Life, upon the Woods, upon the Waters, and upon the Sands; and to these I have added a concluding chapter upon Great Projects of Physical Change accomplished or proposed by Man. It is perhaps superfluous to add, what indeed sufficiently ap- pears upon every page of the volume, that I address myself not to professed physicists, but to the general intelligence of observ- ing and thinking men; and that my purpose is rather to make practical suggestions than to indulge in theoretical speculations more properly suited to a different class from that for which I write. GEORGE P. MARSH. December 1, 1868. PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1874. In preparing for the press an Italian translation of this work, published at Florence in 1870, I made numerous corrections in the statement of both facts and opinions; I incorporated into tha text and introduced in notes a large amount of new data and other illustrative matter; I attempted to improve the method by differently arranging many of the minor subdivisions of the chap- ters; and I suppressed a few passages which seemed to me super- fluous.: In the present edition, which is based on the Italian transla- tion, | have made many further corrections and changes of ar- rangement of the original matter ; I have rewritten a considera ble portion of the work, and have made, in the text and in notes, numerous and important additions, founded partly on observa. tions of my own, partly on those of other students of Physical Geography, and though my general conclusions remain substan- tially the same as those I first announced, yet I think I may claim to have given greater completeness and a more consequent and logical form to the whole argument. Since the publication of the original edition, Mr. Elisée Reclus, in the second volume of his admirable work, Za Terre (Paris, 1868), lately made accessible to English-reading students, has treated, in a general way, the subject I have undertaken to dis- cuss. He has, however, occupied himself with the conservative and restorative, rather than with the destructive, effects of human industry, and he has drawn an attractive and encouraging picture (xi) xii PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1874, of the ameliorating influences of the action of man, and of the compensations by which he, consciously or unconsciously, makes amends for the deterioration which he has produced in the me- dium he inhabits. The labors of Mr. Reclus, therefore, though aiming at a much higher and wider scope than I have had in view, are, in this particular point, a complement to my own. I earnestly recommend the work of this able writer to the atten: ‘tion of my readers. GEORGE P. MARSH. Rome, May 1, 1873. 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Das Karstgebiet, etc. 1 vol. 8vo. 1876. Wetzstein, J. G. Reisebericht tiber Hauran und die Trachonen. Berlin, 1860. 8vo. Wild, Albert. Die Niederlande. Leipzig, 1862. 2 vols. 8vo. Withelm, Gustav. Der Boden und das Wasser. Wien, 1861. 8vo. Wilkinson. WHand-Book for Travellers in Egypt. Williams, Dr. History of Vermont. 2 vols. 8vo. Winkler. Zand en Duinen. Dockum, 1865. 1 vol. 8vo. Wittwer, W. C. Die Physikalische Geographie. Leipzig, 1855. 8vo. Wulfsberg. Norges Verstandskilder. Young, Arthur. Voyages en France, pendant les années 1787, 1788, 1789, précédée d’une introduction par Lavergne. Paris, 1860. 2 vols. 12mo. Voyages en Italie et en Espagne, pendant les années 1787, 1789. Paris, 1860. 1 vol. 12mo. Yule, Col. H. Mission to the Court of Ava. London, 1857. 1 vol. folio. Illustrated. wee) EARTH AS MODIFIED BY HUMAN ACTION. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. Natural Advantages of the Territory of the Roman Empire.—Physical Decay of that Territory.—Causes of the Decay.—Reaction of Man on Nature.— Observation of Nature.—Uncertainty of Our Historical Knowledge of Ancient Climates.— Uncertainty of Modern Meteorology.— Stability of Nature.—Formation of Bogs.—Natural Conditions Favorable to Geo- graphical Change.—Destructiveness of Man.—Human and Brute Action Compared.—Limits of Human Power.—Importance of Physical Conser- vation and Restoration.—Uncertainty as to Effects of Human Action. Natural Adwantages of the Territory of the Roman Empire. Tue Roman Empire, at the period of its greatest expansion, comprised the regions of the earth most distinguished by a happy combination of physical conditions. The provinces bordering on the principal and the secondary basins of the Mediterranean en- joyed, in healthfulness and equability of climate, in fertility of soil, in variety of vegetable and mineral products, and in natural facilities for the transportation and distribution of exchangeable commodities, advantages which have not been possessed in an equal degree by any territory of like extent in the Old World or the New. The abundance of the land and of the waters adequately supplied every material want, ministered liberally to every sensu- ous enjoyment. Gold and silver, indeed, were not found in the profusion which has proved so baneful to the industry of lands richer in veins of the precious metals; but mines and river beds yielded them in the spare measure most favorable to stability of value in the medium of exchange, and, consequently, to the regu- larity of commercial transactions. The ornaments of the barbarie 2 THE ROMAN EMPIRE. pride of the East, the pearl, the ruby, the sapphire, and the dia- mond—though not unknown to the luxury of a people whose conquests and whose wealth commanded whatever the habitable world could contribute to augment the material splendor of their social life—were scarcely native to the territory of the empire; but the comparative rarity of these gems in Europe at somewhat earlier periods, was, perhaps, the very circumstance that led the cunning artists of classic antiquity to enrich softer stones with en- graving’s that invest the common onyx and cornelian with a worth surpassing, in cultivated eyes, the lustre of the most brilliant ori- ental jewels. Of these manifold blessings the temperature of the air, the dis- tribution of the rains, the relative disposition of land and water, the plenty of the sea, the composition of the soil, and the raw material of the primitive arts, were wholly gratuitous gifts. Yet the spontaneous nature of Europe, of Western Asia, of Libya, neither fed nor clothed the civilized inhabitants of those proy- inces. The luxuriant harvests of cereals that waved on every field from the shores of the Rhine to the banks of the Nile, the vines that festooned the hillsides of Syria, of Italy and of Greece, the olives of Spain, the fruits of the gardens of the Hesperides, the domestic quadrupeds and fowls known in ancient rural hus- bandry—all these were original products of foreign climes, nat- uralized in new homes, and gradually ennobled by the art of man, while centuries of persevering labor were expelling the wild vege- tation, and fitting the earth for the production of more generous growths. Every loaf was eaten in the sweat of the brow. All must be earned by toil. But toil was nowhere else rewarded by so generous wages ; for nowhere would a given amount of intelli- gent labor produce so abundant, and, at the same time, so varied returns of the good things of material existence. Physical Decay of the Territory of the Roman Empire. If we compare the present physical condition of the countries of which I am speaking, with the descriptions that ancient his- torians and geographers have given of their fertility and general capability of ministering to human uses, we shall find that more than one-half their whole extent—not excluding the provinces PHYSICAL DECAY OF ROMAN EMPIRE. 3 most celebrated for the profusion and variety of their spontane- ous and their cultivated products, and for the wealth and social advancement of their inhabitants—is either deserted by civilized man and surrendered to hopeless desolation, or at least greatly re- duced in both productiveness and population. Vast forests have disappeared from mountain spurs and ridges ; the vegetable earth accumulated beneath the trees by the decay of leaves and of fallen trunks, the soil of the alpine pastures which skirted and indented the woods, and the mould of the upland fields, are washed away ; meadows, once fertilized by irrigation, are waste and unproduc- tive, because the cisterns and reservoirs that supplied the ancient canals are broken, or the springs that fed them dried up; rivers famous in history and song have shrunk to humble brooklets ; the willows that ornamented and protected the banks of the lesser watercourses are gone, and the rivulets have ceased to exist as perennial currents, because the little water that finds its way into their old channels is evaporated by the droughts of summer, or absorbed by the parched earth before it reaches the lowlands ; the beds of. the brooks have widened into broad expanses of pebbles and gravel, over which, though in the hot season passed dryshod, in winter sealike torrents thunder; the entrances of navigable streams are obstructed by sandbars; and harbors, once marts of an extensive commerce, are shoaled by the deposits of the rivers at whose mouths they lie; the elevation of the beds of estuaries, and the consequently diminished velocity and increased lateral spread of the streams which flow into them, have converted thou- sands of leagues of shallow sea and fertile lowland into unpro- ductive and miasmatic morasses. Besides the direct testimony of history to the ancient fertility of the now exhausted regions to which I refer—Northern Africa, the greater Arabian peninsula, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia and many other provinces of Asia Minor, Greece, Sicily, and parts of even Italy and Spain—the multitude and extent of yet remaining architectural ruins, and of decayed works of internal improve- ment, show that at former epochs a dense population inhabited those now lonely districts. Such a population could have been sustained only by a productiveness of soil of which we at present discover but slender traces; and the abundance derived from that fertility serves to explain how large armies, like those of the an- 4 CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. cient Persians, and of the Crusaders and the Tartars in later ages, could, without an organized commissariat, secure adequate sup: plies in long marches through territories which, in our times, would scarcely afford forage for a single regiment. It appears, then, that the fairest and fruitfulest provinces of the Roman Empire, precisely that portion of terrestrial surface, in short, which, about the commencement of the Christian era, was endowed with the greatest superiority of soil, climate and po- sition, which had been carried to the highest pitch of physical improvement, and which thus combined the natural and artificial conditions best fitting it for the habitation and enjoyment of a dense and highly refined and cultivated population, are now com- pletely exhausted of their fertility, or so diminished in produc- tiveness, as, with the exception of a few favored oases that have escaped the general ruin, to be no longer capable of affording sus- tenance to civilized man. If to this realm of desolation we add the now wasted and solitary soils of Persia and the remoter East that once fed their millions with milk and honey, we shall see that a territory larger than all Europe, the abundance of which sustained in bygone centuries a population scarcely inferior to that of the whole Christian world at the present day, has been entirely withdrawn from human use, or, at best, is thinly inhab- ited by tribes too few in numbers, too poor in superfluous prod- ucts, and too little advanced in culture and the social arts, to con- tribute anything to the general moral or material interests of the great commonwealth of man. Causes of this Decay. The decay of these once flourishing countries is partly due, no doubt, to that class of geological causes whose action we can nei- ther resist nor guide, and partly also to the direct violence of hos- tile human force; but it is, in a far greater proportion, either the result of man’s ignorant disregard of the laws of nature, or an in- cidental consequence of war and of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny and misrule. Next to ignorance of these laws, the primitive source, the causa causarum, of the acts and neglects which have blasted with sterility and physical decrepitude the noblest half of the empire of the Czsars, is, first, the brutal and exhansting des- CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. a) potism which Rome herself exercised over her conquered king- doms and even over her Italian territory ; then, the host of tem- poral and spiritual tyrannies which she left as her dying curse to all her wide dominion, and which, in some form of violence or of fraud, still brood over almost every soil subdued by the Ro- man legions.* Man cannot struggle at once against human op- *In the Middle Ages, feudalism, and a nominal Christianity whose corrup- tions had converted the most beneficent of religions into the most baneful of superstitions, perpetuated every abuse of Roman tyranny, and added new oppressions and new methods of extortion to those invented by older despot- isms. The burdens in question fell most heavily on the provinces that had been longest colonized by the Latin race, and these are the portions of Europe which have suifered the greatest physical degradation. ‘‘ Feudalism,” says Blanqui, ‘‘ was a concentration of scourges. The peasant, stripped of the inheritance of his fathers, became the property of inflexible, ignorant, indo- lent masters ; he was obliged to travel fifty leagues with their carts whenever they required it; he labored for them three days in the week, and surrendered to them half the product of his earnings during the other three; without . their consent he could not change his residence, or marry. And why, indeed, should he wish to marry, when he could scarcely save enough to maintain himself ?- The Abbot Alcuin had twenty thousand slaves, called serfs, who: were forever attached to the soil. This is the great cause of the rapid depop- ulation observed in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of mon- asteries which sprang up on every side. It was doubtless a relief to such mis- erable men to find in the cloisters a retreat from oppression; but the human race never suffered a more cruel outrage, industry never received a wound better calculated to plunge the world again into the darkness of the rudest antiquity. It suffices to say that the prediction of the approaching end of the world, industriously spread by the rapacious monks at this time, was received without terror.”—Réswmé de 0 Histoire du Commerce, p. 156. See also Micu- BLET, Histoire de France, Vol. V., pp. 216, 217. The abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which in the time of Charlemagne had possessed a million of acres, was, down to the Revolution, still so wealthy that the personal income of the abbot was 800,000 livres. The abbey of Saint- Denis was nearly as rich as that of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.—LAVERGNE, Economie Rurale de la France, p. 104. Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruyére the following striking picture of the condition of the French peasantry in his time: ‘‘ One sees certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scattered over the country and attached to the soil, which they root and turn over with indomi- table perseverance. They have, as it were, an articulate voice, and when they rise to their feet, they show a human face. They are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the labor of ploughing, sowing and harvesting, and therefore deserve some small share of the bread they have grown.” ‘‘ These are his own words,” adds Courier, ‘‘and he is speaking of the fortwnate peas- 6 CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. pression and the destructive forces of inorganic nature. When both are combined against him, he succumbs after a shorter or longer struggle, and the fields he has won from the primeval wood relapse into their original state of wiid and luxuriant, but unprofitable, forest growth, or fall into that of a dry and barren wilderness. Rome imposed on the products of agricultural labor, in the ru- ral districts, taxes which the sale of the entire harvest would scarcely discharge; she drained them of their population by mil- itary conscription ; she impoverished the peasantry by forced and unpaid labor on public works; she hampered industry and both foreign and internal commerce by absurd restrictions and unwise regulations.* Hence, large tracts of land were left uncultivated, ants, of those who had work and bread, and they were then the few.”—Péti- tion ad la Chambre des Députés pour les Villageois que Von empéche de danser. Arthur Young, who travelled in France from 1787 to 1789, gives, in the twenty-first chapter of his Zravels, a frightful account of the burdens of the rural population even at that late period. Besides the regular governmental taxes and a multitude of heavy fines imposed for trifling offences, he enumer- ates about thirty seignorial rights, the very origin and nature of some of which are now unknown, while those of some others are as repulsive to humanity and morality as the worst abuses ever practised by heathen despot- ism. But Young underrates the number of these oppressive impositions, Mo- reau de Jonnés, a higher authority, asserts that in a brief examination he had discovered upwards of three hundred distinct rights of the feudatory over the person or the property of his vassal. See Etat Economique et Social de la France, Paris, 1870, p. 389. Most of these, indeed, had been commuted for money payments, and were levied on the peasantry as pecuniary imposts for the benefit of prelates and lay lords, who, by virtue of their nobility, were exempt from taxation. The collection of the taxes was enforced with unre- lenting severity. On one occasion, in the reign of Louis XIV., the troops sent out against the recreant peasants made more than 3,000 prisoners, of whom 400 were condemned to the galleys for life, and a number so large that the government did not dare to disclose it, were hung on trees or broken on the wheel.—MorEAv DE Jonnbs, Etat Economique et "Boctal de la France, p. 420. Who can wonder at the hostility of the French plebeian classes towards the aristocracy in the days of the Revolution ? * Commerce, in common with all gainful occupations except agriculture, was despised by the Romans, and the exercise of it was forbidden to the high- er ranks. Cicero, however, admits that though retail trade, which could only prosper by lying and knavery, was contemptible, yet wholesale commerce was not altogether to be condemned, and might even be laudable, provided the merchant retired early from trade and invested his gains in farm lands.—De Officits, lib. i., 42. NEW SCHOOL OF GEOGRAPHERS. Yj or altogether deserted, and exposed to all the destructive forces which act with such energy on the surface of the earth when it is deprived of those protections by which nature originally guarded it, and for which, in well-ordered husbandry, human ingenuity has contrived more or less efficient substitutes.* Sim- ilar abuses have tended to perpetuate and extend these evils in later ages, and it is but recently that, even in the most populous parts of Europe, public attention has been half awakened to the necessity of restoring the disturbed harmonies of nature, whose well-balanced influences are so propitious to all her organic off- spring, and of repaying to our great mother the debt which the prodigality and the thriftlessness of former generations have im- posed upon their successors—thus fulfilling the command of re- ligion and of practical wisdom, to use this world as not abusing it. New School of Geographers. The labors of Humboldt, of Ritter, of Guyot and their follow- ers, have given to the science of Geography a more philosophical, and, at the same time, a more imaginative character than it had received from the hands of their predecessors. Perhaps the most interesting field of speculation, thrown open by the new school to the cultivators of this attractive study, is the inquiry: how far external physical conditions, especially the configuration of the earth’s surface, and the distribution, outline and relative position of land and water, have influenced the social life and social prog- ress of man. The revolutions of the seasons, with their alterations of tem- perature and of length of day and night, the climates of different zones, and the general conditions and movements of the atmos- * The temporary depopulation of an exhausted soil may be, in some cases, a physical, though, like fallows in agriculture, a dear-bought advantage. Under favorable circumstances, the withdrawal of man and his flocks allows the earth to clothe itself again with forests, and in a few generations to recover its ancient productiveness. In the Middle Ages, worn-out fields were depop- ulated, in many parts of the Continent, by civil and ecclesiastical tyrannies which insisted on the surrender of the half of a loaf already too small to sus- tain its producer. Thus abandoned, these lands often relapsed into the forest state, and, some centuries later, were again brought under cultivation with renovated fertility. 8 REACTION OF MAN ON NATURE. phere and the seas, depend upon causes for the most part cosmi- eal, and, of course, wholly beyond our control. The elevation, configuration and composition of the great masses of terrestrial surface, and the relative extent and distribution of land and water, are determined by geological influences equally remote from our jurisdiction. It would hence seem that the physical adaptation of different portions of the earth to the use and enjoyment of man is a matter so strictly belonging to mightier than human powers, that we can only accept geographical nature as we find her, and be content with such soils and such skies as she spon- taneously offers. Lreaction of Man on Nature. But it is certain that man has reacted upon organized and in- organic nature, and thereby modified, if not determined, the ma- terial structure of his earthly home. The measure of that reac- tion manifestly constitutes a very important element in the ap- preciation of the relations between mind and matter, as well as in the discussion of many purely physical problems. But though the subject has been incidentally touched upon by many geogra- phers, and treated with much fulness of detail in regard to certain limited fields of human effort and to certain specific effects of hu- man action, it has not, as a whole, so far as I know, been made matter of special observation, or of historical research, by any scientific inquirer. Indeed, until the influence of geographical conditions upon human life was recognized as a distinct branch of philosophical investigation, there was no motive for the pursuit of such speculations; and it was desirable to inquire how far we have, or can, become the architects of our own abiding place, only when it was known how the mode of our physical, moral and in- tellectual being is affected by the character of the home which Providence has appointed, and we have fashioned, for our ma- terial habitation.* It is still too early to attempt scientific method in discussing this problem, nor is our present store of the necessary facts by any * Gods Almagt wenkte van den troon, En schiep elk volk een land ter woon: Hier vestte Zij een grondgebied, Dat Zij ons zelven scheppen liet. REACTION OF MAN ON NATURE. 9 means complete enough to warrant me in promising any approach to fulness of statement respecting them. Systematic observation in relation to this subject has hardly yet begun, and the scattered data which have chanced to be recorded have never been collected. It has now no place in the general scheme of physical science, and is matter of suggestion and speculation only, not of established and positive conclusion. At present, then, all that I can hope is to excite an interest in a topic of much economical importance, by pointing out the directions and illustrating the modes in which human action has been, or may be, most injurious or most bene- ficial in its influence upon the physical conditions of the earth we inhabit. We can not always distinguish between the results of man’s ac- tion and the effects of purely geological or cosmical causes. The destruction of the forests, the drainage of lakes and marshes, and the operations of rural husbandry and industrial art, have un- questionably tended to produce great changes in the hygrometric, thermometric, electric, and chemical condition of the atmosphere, though we are not yet able to measure the force of the different elements of disturbance, or to say how far they have been neutral- | ised by each other or by still obscurer influences ; and it is equally certain that the myriad forms of animal and vegetable life, which covered the earth when man first entered upon the theatre of a nature whose harmonies he was destined to derange, have been, through his interference, greatly changed in numerical proportion, sometimes much modified in form and product, and sometimes entirely extirpated.* * Man has not only subverted the natural numerical relations of wild as well as domestic quadrupeds, fish, birds, reptiles, insects, and common plants, and even of still humbler tribes of animal and vegetable life, but he has effected, in the forms, habits, nutriment and products of the organisms which minister to his wants and his pleasures, changes which, more than any other manifesta- tion of human energy, resemble the ex. ~cise of a creative power. Even wild animals have been compelled by him, tuhiough the destruction of plants and insects which furnished their proper aliment, to resort to food belonging to a different kingdom of nature. Thus a New Zealand bird, originally gran- ivorous and insectivorous, has become carnivorous, from the want of its natural supplies, and now tears the fleeces from the backs of the sheep in order to feed on their living flesh, All these changes have exercised more or less direct or indirect action on — 10 REACTION OF MAN ON NATURE. The physical revolutions thus wrought by man have not indeed all been destructive to human interests, and the heaviest blows he has inflicted upon nature have not been wholly without their com- pensations. Soils to which no nutritious vegetable was indige- nous, countries which once brought forth but the fewest products suited for the sustenance and comfort of man—while the severity of their climates created and stimulated the greatest number and the most imperious urgency of physical wants—surfaces the most rugged and intractable, and least blessed with natural facilities of communication, have been brought in modern times to yield and distribute all that supplies the material necessities, all that con- tributes to the sensuous enjoyments and conveniences of civilized life. The Scythia, the Thule, the Britain, the Germany and the Gaul which the Roman writers describe in such forbidding terms, have been brought almost to rival the native luxuriance and easily won plenty of Southern Italy ; and, while the fountains of oil and wine that refreshed old Greece and Syria and Northern Africa have almost ceased to flow, and the soils of those fair lands are turned to thirsty and inhospitable deserts, the hyperborean regions of Europe have learned to conquer, or rather compensate, the rigors of climate, and have attained to a material wealth and va- riety of product that, with all their natural advantages, the grana- ries of the ancient world can hardly be said to have enjoyed. the inorganic surface of the globe; and the history of the geographical revo- lutions thus produced would furnish ample material for a volume. The modification of organic species by domestication is a branch of philo- sophic inquiry which we may almost say has been created by Darwin; but the geographical results of these modifications do not appear to have yet been made a subject of scientific investigation. I do not know that the following passage from Pliny has ever been cited in connection with the Darwinian theories, but it is worth a reference : ‘* But behold a very strange and new fashion of them [cucumbers] in Cam- pane, for there you shall have abundance of them come up in forme of a Quince. And as I heare say, one of them chaunced so to grow first at a very venture ; but afterwards from the seed of it came a whole race and progenie of the like, which therefore they call Melopopones, as a man would say, the Quince-pompions or cucumbers.”—Putny, Nat. Hist., Holland’s translation, book xix., c. 5. The word cucwmis used in the original of this passage embraces many of the cucurbitacex, but the context shows that it here means the cucumber. OBSERVATION OF NATURE. EE Observation of Nature. In these pages it is my aim to stimulate, not to satisfy, curiosity, and it is no part of my object to save my readers the labor of ob- servation or of thought. For labor is life, and Death lives where power lives unused.* Self is the schoolmaster whose lessons are best worth his wages ; and since the subject I am considering has not yet become a branch of formal instruction, those whom it may interest can, fortunately, have no pedagogue but themselves. To the natural philosopher, the descriptive poet, the painter, the sculptor, and indeed every earnest observer, the power most important to cultivate, and, at the same time, hardest to acquire, is that of seeing what is before him. Sight is a faculty; seeing, an art. The eye is a physical but not a self-acting apparatus, and in general it sees only what it seeks. Like a mirror, it reflects objects presented to it; but it may be as insensible as a mirror, and not consciously perceive what it reflects. It has been maintained by high authority, that the natural acuteness of our sensuous faculties can not be heightened by use, and hence, that the minutest details of the image formed on the retina are as perfect in the most untrained as in the most thor- oughly disciplined organ. This may be questioned, and it is agreed on all hands that the power of multifarious perception and rapid discrimination may be immensely increased by well- directed practice.t This exercise of the eye I desire to promote, * Verses addressed by G. C. to Sir Walter Raleigh.—Hax.ort, i., p. 668. + I troer, at Synets Sands er lagt i Oiet, Mens dette kun er Redskab. Synet strémmer Fra Sjelens Dyb, og Oiets fine Nerver Gaae ud fra Hjernens hemmelige Verksted. HeEnrRIK Hertz, Kong René’s Datter, sc. ii. In the material eye, you think, sight lodgeth ! The eye is but an organ. Seeing streameth From the soul’s inmost depths, The fine perceptive Nerve springeth from the brain’s mysterious workshop. ¢ I have witnessed instances of extraordinary powers of vision in Arabs of the Desert, and in seamen, but I have not had an opportunity of testing how far this acuteness of sight was due to practice. In regard to the faculty ot 12 OBSERVATION OF NATURR. and, next to moral and religious doctrine, I know no more im- portant practical lessons in this earthly life of ours—whica, tc the wise man, is a school from the cradle to the grave—than those relating to the employment of the sense of vision in the study of nature. The pursuit of physical geography, embracing actual observa- tion of terrestrial surface, affords to the eye the best general training that is accessible to all. The majority of even cultiva- ted men have not the time and means of acquiring more than a very superficial acquaintance with any branch of physical knowl- edge. Natural science has become so vastly extended, its re- hearing I can speak with more confidence. Every person who has had any considerable experience in linguistic studies knows that many of the peculiar articulate sounds of almost any human speech are not only not readily imita- ble by those unacquainted with the language, but at first absolutely inaudible, though with frequent repetition they can not only be heard but reproduced. The senses of children are exceedingly acute, but become less so in mature life. JI remember seeing, in a city on the shore of one of our American lakes, a boy about twelve years old who recognized, by the sound of the puff of the high-pressure engines then in use, every steamer which approached the har- bor. Ina case where a thief had fled from the scene of his plunder, leaving his hat behind him, the police officer carried the hat to a neighboring school, where it was at once recognized by the boys as belonging to a particular indi- vidual, and upon that indication the thief was arrested. Skill in marksmanship, whether with firearms or with other projectile weap- ons, depends more upon the training of the eye than is generally supposed, and I have often found particularly good shots to possess an almost telescopic vision. In the ordinary use of the rifle, the barrel is guided by the eye, but there are sportsmen who fire with the butt of the gun at the hip. In this case, as in the use of the sling, the lasso, and the bolas, in hurling the knife (see BaBIneEt, Lectures, vii., p. 84), in throwing the boomerang, the javelin, or a stone, and in the employment of the blowpipe and the bow, the movements of the hand and arm are guided by that mysterious sympathy which exists be- tween the eye and the unseeing organs of the body. ‘«Some men wonder whye, in casting a man’s eye at the marke, the hand should go streighte. Surely if he considered the nature of a man’s eye he would not wonder at it: for this I am certaine of, that no servaunt to his maister, no childe to his father, is so obedient, as every joynte and peece of the bodye is to do whatsover the eye biddes.”—Rocrr Ascuam, Tozophilus, Book ii. In shooting the tortoises of the Amazon and its tributaries, the Indians use an arrow with a long twine and a float attached to it. Avé-Lallemant (Die Benutzung der Palmen am Amazonenstrom, p. 32) thus describes their mode of aiming: ‘‘ As the arrow, if aimed directly at the floating tortoise, would strike it at a small angle and glance from its flat and wet shell, the archers have @ OBSERVATION OF NATURE. dts) corded facts and its unanswered questions so immensely multi- plied, that every strictly scientific man must be a specialist, and | must confine the researches of a whole life within a comparatively | narrow circle. The study I am recommending, in the view I propose to take of it, is yet in that imperfectly developed state which allows its votaries to occupy themselves with broad and general views attainable by every person of culture, and it does not now require a knowledge of special details which only years of application can master.* It may be profitably pursued by all: peculiar method of shooting. They are able to calculate exactly their own muscular effort, the velocity of the stream, the distance and size of the tor- toise, and they shoot the arrow directly up into the air, so that it falls almost vertically upon the shell of the tortoise, and sticks in it.” Analogous calcula- tions—if such physico-mental operations can properly be so called—are made in the use of other missiles ; for no projectile flies in a right line to its mark. The exact training of the eye lies at the bottom of them all, and marks- manship depends almost wholly upon the power of that organ, whose direc- tions the blind muscles implicitly follow. Savages accustomed only to the use of the bow become good shots with firearms after very little practice. It is perhaps not out of place to observe here that our English word aim comes from the Latin estimo, I calculate or estimate. See WEDGwoop’s Dic- tionary of English Etymology, and the note to the American edition, under Aim. Another proof of the control of the limbs by the eye has been observed in deaf-and-dumb schools, and in others where pupils are first taught to write ou large slates or blackboards. The writing is in large characters, the small let- ters being an inch or more high. They are formed with chalk or a slate pen- cil firmly grasped in the fingers, and by appropriate motions of the wrist, elbow, and shoulder, not of the finger joints. Nevertheless, when a pen is put into the hand of a pupil thus taught, his handwriting, though produced by a totally different set of muscles and muscular movements, is identical in character with that which he has practiced on the blackboard. For a very remarkable account of the restoration of vision impaired from age, by judicious training, see Lessons in Life by Trmoruy Tircoms, les- son Xi. It has been much doubted whether the artists of the classic ages possessed a more perfect sight than those of modern times, or whether, in executing their minute mosaics and gem engravings, they used magnifiers. Glasses ground convex have been found at Pompeii, but they are too rudely fashioned and too imperfectly polished to have been of any practical use for optical pur- poses. But though the ancient artists may have had a microscopic vision, their astronomers can not have had a telescopic power of sight; for they did not discover the satellites of Jupiter, which are often seen with the naked eye at Oormeeah, in Persia, and sometimes, as I can testify by personal observa- tion, at Cairo. * The introduction of mathematical method into the study of physical 14 CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. and every traveller, every lover of rural scenery, every agricul- turist, who will wisely use the gift of sight, may add valuable contributions to the common stock of knowledge on a subject which, as I hope to convince my readers, though long neglected and now inartificially presented, is not only a very important but a very interesting field of inquiry. Measurement of Man's Influence. The exact measurement of the geographical and climatic changes hitherto effected by man is impracticable, and we pos- sess, in relation to them, the means of only qualitative, not quan- titative, analysis. The fact of such revolutions is established partly by historical evidence, partly by analogical deduction from effects produced, in our own time, by operations similar in char- acter to those which must have taken place in more or less re- mote ages of human action. Both sources of information are alike defective in precision; the latter, for general reasons too obvious to require specification ; the former, because the facts to. which it bears testimony occurred before the habit or the means of rigorously scientific observation upon any branch of physical research, and especially upon climatic changes, existed. Uncertainty of our Historical Conclusions on Ancient Chi- mates. The invention of measures of heat and of atmospheric moist- ure, pressure and precipitation, is extremely recent. Hence, an- cient physicists have left us no thermometric or barometric rec- ords, no tables of the fall, evaporation and flow of waters, and even no accurate maps of coast lines and the course of rivers. Their notices of these phenomena are almost wholly confined to excessive and exceptional instances of high or of low tempera- tures, to extraordinary falls of rain and snow, and to unusual floods or droughts. Our knowledge of the meteorological condi- tion of the earth, at any period more than two centuries before science, though attended with some highly beneficial results, has impeded the progress of Physical Geography by discouraging its pursuit as unworthy of cultivation because incapable of precise results. CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES, 15 our own time, is derived from these imperfect details, from the vague statements of ancient historians and geographers in regard to the volume of rivers and the relative extent of forest and cul- tivated land, from the indications furnished by the history of the agriculture and rural economy of past generations, and from other almost purely casual sources of information.* Among these latter we must rank certain newly laid-open fields of investigation, from which facts bearing on the point now under consideration have been gathered. I allude to the discovery of artificial objects in geological formations older than any hitherto recognized as exhibiting traces of the existence of man; to the ancient lacustrine habitations of Switzerland and of the terremare of Italy, containing the implements of the occupants, remains of their food, and other relics of human life ; to the curious revelations of the Ajékkenmiddinger, or heaps of kitchen refuse, in Denmark and elsewhere, and of the peat mosses in the same and other northern countries; to the dwellings and other evidences of the industry of aman in remote ages, sometimes laid bare by the movement of sand dunes on the coasts of France and of the North Sea; and to the facts disclosed on the tide-washed flats of the latter shores by excavations in Halligs, or inhabited mounds, which were probably raised before the era of the Roman Empire.{ These remains are memorials of races which have left no written records—races which perished at a period beyond the reach of even historical tradition. The plants and animals that furnished the relics found in the deposits were certainly contemporaneous with man; for they are associated with his works, and have evidently served his uses. In some cases, the animals belonged to species well ascer- * The subject of climatic change, with and without reference to human action as a cause, has been much discussed by Moreau de Jonnés, Dureau de la Malle, Arago, Humboldt, Fuster, Gasparin, Becquerel, Schleiden and many other writers in Europe, and by Noah Webster, Forry, Drake and others in America. Fraas has endeavored to show, by the history of vegetation in Greece, not merely that clearing and cultivation have affected climate, but that change of climate has essentially modified the character of vegetable life. See his Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit. + See two learned articles by Pigorini, in the Nuova Antologia for January and October, 1870. t For a very picturesque description of the Halligs, see PLiny, WV. H., Book Xvi, c: 1: 16 CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. tained to be now altogether extinct ; in some others, both the ani mals and the vegetables, though extant elsewhere, have ceased to inhabit the regions where their remains are discovered. From the character of the artificial objects, as compared with others be- longing to known dates, or at least to: known periods of civiliza- tion, ingenious inferences have been drawn as to their age; and from the vegetable remains which accompany them, as to the climates of Central and Northern Europe at the time of their production. There are, however, sources of error which have not always been sufficiently guarded against in making these estimates. When a boat, composed of several pieces of wood fastened to- gether by pins of the same material, is dug out of a bog, it is in- ferred that the vessel, and the skeletons and implements found with it, belong to an age when the use of iron was not known to the builders. But this conclusion is not warranted by the simple fact that metals were not employed in its construction; for the Nubians at this day build boats, large enough to carry half a dozen persons across the Nile, out of small pieces of acacia wood pinned together entirely with wooden bolts, and large vessels of similar construction are used by the islanders of the Malay archipelago. Nor is the occurrence of flint arrowheads and knives, in conjunc- tion with other evidences of human life, conclusive proof as to the antiquity of the latter. Lyell informs that some Oriental tribes still continue to use the same stone implements as their ancestors, “after that mighty empires, where the use of metals in the arts was well known, had flourished for three thousand years in their neighborhood”; * and the North American Indians now manu- facture weapons of stone, and even of glass, chipping them in the latter case out of the bottoms of thick bottles with great facility.f * Antiquity of Man, p. 377. + ‘‘One of the Indians seated himself near me, and made from a fragment of quartz, with a simple piece of round bone, one end of which was hemi- spherical, with a small crease in it (as if worn by a thread) the sixteenth of an inch deep, an arrow head which was very sharp and piercing, and such as they use on all their arrows. The skill and rapidity with which it was made, with- out a blow, but by simply breaking the sharp edges with the creased bone by the strength of his hands—for the crease merely served to prevent the instru- ment from slipping, affording no leverage—was remarkable.”—Reports of Ha- CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. 17 We may also be misled by our ignorance of the commercial re- lations existing between savage tribes. Hxtremely rude nations, in spite of their jealousies and their perpetual wars, sometimes contrive to exchange the products of provinces very widely sepa- rated from each other. The mounds of Ohio contain pearls, thought to be marine, which must have come from the Gulf of Mexico, or perhaps even from California, and the knives and pipes found in the same graves are often formed of far-fetched material, that was naturally paid for by some home product ex- ported to the locality whence the material was derived. The art of preserving fish, flesh and fowl by drying and smoking is widely diffused and of great antiquity. The Indians of Long Island Sound are said to have carried on a trade in dried shell-fish with tribes residing very far inland. From the earliest ages, the in- habitants of the Faroe and Orkney Islands, and of the opposite mainland coasts, have smoked wild fowl and other flesh. Hence it is possible that the animal and the vegetable food, the remains of which are found in the ancient deposits I am speaking of, may sometimes have been brought from climates remote from that where it was consumed. The most important, as well as the most trustworthy, conclu- sions with respect to the climate of ancient Europe and Asia, are those drawn from the accounts given by the classical writers of the growth of cultivated plants; but these are by no means free from uncertainty, because we can seldom be sure of an identity of species, almost never of an identity of race or variety, between vegetables known to the agriculturists of Greece and Rome and those of modern times which are thought most nearly to resemble them. Besides this, there is always room for doubt whether the habits of plants long grown in different countries may not have been so changed by domestication or by natural selection, that the conditions of temperature and humidity which they required twenty centuries ago were different from those at present de- manded for their advantageous cultivation.* plorations and Surveys for Pacific Railroad, vol. ii., 1855, Liewt. BecKwItTH’s Report, p. 48. See also American Naturalist for May, 1870, and especially Stevens, Flint Chips, London, 1870, pp. 77 et seq. Mariette Bey lately saw an Egyptian barber shave the head of an Arab with a flint razor. * Probably no cultivated vegetable affords so good an opportunity of study- 18 CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. Even if we suppose an identity of species, of race, and of habit, to be established between a given ancient and modern plant, the negative fact that the latter will not grow now where it flourished two thousand years ago, does not, in all cases, prove a change of climate. The same result might follow from the exhaustion of the soil,* or from a change in the quantity of moisture it habitu- ing the laws of acclimation of plants as maize or Indian corn. Maize is grown from the tropics to at least lat. 47° in Northeastern America, and farther north in Europe. Every two or three degrees of latitude bring you to a new variety, with new climatic adaptations, and the capacity of the plant to ac- commodate itself to new conditions of temperature and season seems almost unlimited. Many persons now living remember that, when the common tomato was first introduced into Northern New England, it often failed to ripen ; but, in the course of a very few years, it completely adapted itself to the climate, and now not only matures both its fruit and its seeds with as much certainty as any cultivated vegetable, but regularly propagates itself by self-sown seed. Me- teorological observations, however, do not show any amelioration of the sum- mer climate in those States within that period. It may be said that these cases—and indeed all cases of a supposed acclima- tion consisting in physiological changes—are instances of the origination of new varieties by natural selection, the hardier maize, tomato, and other veg- etables of the North, being the progeny of seeds of individuals endowed, ex- ceptionally, with greater power of resisting cold than belongs in general to the species which produced them. But, so far as the evidence of change of cli- mate, drawn from a difference in vegetable growth, is concerned, it is imma- terial whether we adopt this view or maintain the older and more familiar doctrine of a local modification of character in the plants in question. Maize and the tomato, if not new to human use, have not been long known to civilization, and were, very probably, reclaimed and domesticated at a much more recent period than the plants which form the great staples of agricul- tural husbandry in Europe and Asia. Is the great power of accommodation to climate possessed by them due to this circumstance? There is some reason to suppose that the character of maize has been sensibly changed by cultiva- tion in South America; for, according to Tschudi, the ears of this grain found in old Peruvian tombs belong to varieties not now known in Peru.— Travels in Peru, chap. vii. See important observations In SCHUBELER, Die Pflanzenwelt Norwegens (Aligemeiner Theil), Christiana, 1873, 77 and follow- ing pp. * The cultivation of madder is said to have been introduced into Europe by an Oriental in the year 1765, and it was first planted in the neighborhood of Avignon. Of course, it has been grown in that district for less than a cen- tury ; but upon soils where it has been a frequent crop, it is already losing much of its coloring properties. —LAVERGNE, Economie Rurale de la France, pp. 259-291. I believe there is no doubt that the cultivation of madder in the vicinity of CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. 19. ally contains. After a district of country has been completely or even partially cleared of its forest growth and brought under cul- tivation, the drying of the soil, under favorable circumstances, goes on for generations, perhaps for ages.* In other cases, from Avignon is of recent introduction ; but it is certain that it was grown by the ancient Romans, and throughout nearly all Europe in the middle ages. The madder brought from Persia to France, may belong to a different species, or at least variety. * In many parts of New England there are tracts, many square miles in ex- tent and presenting all varieties of surface and exposure, which were partially cleared sixty or seventy years ago, and where little or no change in the pro- portion of cultivated ground, pasturage and woodland has taken place since. In some cases, these tracts compose basins apparently scarcely at all exposed to any local influence in the way of percolation or infiltration of water towards or from neighboring valleys. But in such situations, apart from accidental disturbances, the ground is growing drier and drier from year to year, springs are still disappearing, and rivulets still diminishing in their summer supply of water. A probable explanation of this is to be found in the rapid drainage of the surface of cleared ground, which prevents the subterranean natural reservoirs, whether cavities or merely strata of bibulous earth, from filling up. How long this process is to last before an equilibrium is reached, none can say. It may be, for years; it may be, for centuries. Livingstone states facts which strongly favor the supposition that a secular desiccation is still going on in Central Africa, and there is reason to suspect that a like change is taking place in California. When the regions where the earth is growing drier were cleared of wood, or, indeed, whether forests ever grew there, we are unable to say, but the change appears to have been long in progress. A similar revolution appears to have occurred in Arabia Petrea. In many of the wadis, and particularly in the gorges between Wadi Feiran and Wadi Esh Sheikh, there are water-worn banks showing that, at no very remote period, the winter floods must have risen fifty feet in channels where the growth of acacias and tamarisks and the testimony of the Arabs concur to prove that they have not risen six feet within the memory or tradition of the present inhabitants. Recent travellers have discovered traces of extensive an- cient cultivation, and of the former existence of large towns in the Tih desert, in localities where all agriculture is now impossible for want of water. Is this drought due to the destruction of ancient forests or to some other cause ? DT Année Géographique for 1873, pp. 72 and 176, has some very interesting ob- servations on the secular desiccation of the Sahara and of Persia. For important remarks on supposed changes in our Western prairie region, from cultivation of the soil and the introduction of domestic cattle, see Bry- ANT’S valuable Forest Trees, 1871, chapter v., and HayDEN, Preliminary Report on Survey of Wyoming, p. 455. Some physicists believe that the waters of our earth are, from chemical or other less known causes, diminishing by entering into new inorganic combi- nations, and that this element will finally disappear from the globe. 20 CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. injudicious husbandry, or the diversion or choking up of natural watercourses, it may become more highly charged with humidity. An increase or diminution of the moisture of a soil almost neces- sarily supposes an elevation or a depression of its winter or its summer heat, and of its extreme if not of its mean annual tem- perature, though such elevation or depression may be so slight as not sensibly to raise or lower the mercury in a thermometer ex- posed to the open air. Any of these causes, more or less humid- ity, or more or less warmth of soil, would affect the growth both of wild and of cultivated vegetation, and consequently, without any appreciable change in atmospheric temperature, precipitation or evaporation, plants of a particular species might cease to be advantageously cultivated where they had once been easily reared.* * The soil of newly subdued countries is generally highly favorable to the growth of the fruits of the garden and the orchard, but usually becomes much less so in a very few years. Plums, of many varieties, were formerly grown, in great perfection and abundance, in many parts of New England where at present they can scarcely be reared at all; and the peach, which, a generation or two ago, succeeded admirably in the southern portion of the same States, has almost ceased to be cultivated there. The disappearance of these fruits is partly due to the ravages of insects, which have in later years attacked them; but this is evidently by no means the sole, or even the prin- cipal cause of their decay. In these cases, it is not to the exhaustion of the particular acres on which the fruit trees have grown that we are to ascribe their degeneracy, but to a general change in the condition of the soil or the air; for it is equally impossible to rear them successfully on absolutely new land in the neighborhood of grounds where, not long since, they bore the finest fruit. I remember being told, many years ago, by intelligent early settlers of the State of Ohio, that the apple-trees raised there from seed sown soon after the land was cleared, bore fruit in less than half the time required to bring to bearing those reared from seed sown when the ground had been twenty years under cultivation. I can testify from personal recollection that orchards planted by the early settlers in many parts of my native State, Vermont, produced, when they came to bearing, fruit of a quality greatly superior to that borne by the same trees after they were deprived of the shelter of the neighboring forest in consequence of the clearing of the ground for cultiva- tion, I call to mind instances of particular trees whose fruit, originally of great excellence, became almost unpalatable from this cause, or from other influences of rural improvement. For notice of a similar change within the last half century in Scotland, see Wature, Nov. 27, 1878, p. 72. Analogous changes occur slowly and almost imperceptibly even in spon- taneous vegetation. In the peat mosses of Denmark, Scotch firs and other UNCERTAINTY OF MODERN METEOROLOGY, 21 Uncertainty of Modern Meteorology. We are very imperfectly acquainted with the present mean ; and extreme temperature, or the precipitation and the evapora: | tion of any extensive region, even in countries most densely peo- pled and best supplied with instruments and observers. The progress of science is constantly detecting errors of method in older observations, and many laboriously constructed tables of meteorological phenomena are now thrown aside as fallacious, and therefore worse than useless, because some condition neces- sary to secure accuracy of result was neglected, in obtaining and recording the data on which they were founded. To take a familiar instance: it is but recently that attention has been drawn to the great influence of slight differences in station upon the results of observations of temperature and precipitation. Two thermometers hung but a few hundred yards from each other differ not unfrequently five, sometimes even ten degrees in their readings ;* and when we are told that the annual fall of rain on the roof of the observatory at Paris is two inches less than on the ground by the side of it, we may see that the height of the rain- trees not now growing in the same localities, are found in abundance. Every generation of trees leaves the soil in a different state from that in which it found it; every tree that springs up in a group of trees of another species than its own, grows under different influences of light and shade and atmos- phere from its predecessors. Hence the succession of crops, which occurs in all natural forests, seems to be due rather to changes of condition than of cli- mate. See pp. 363-4, post. * Tyndall, in a lecture on Radiation, expresses the opinion that from ten to fifteen per cent. of the heat radiated from the earth is absorbed by aqueous vapor within ten feet of the earth’s surface.—/vragments of Science, 3d edition, London, 1871, p. 208. Thermometers at most meteorological stations, when not suspended at points regulated by the mere personal convenience of the observer, are hung from 20 to 40 feet above the ground. In such positions they are less exposed to disturbance from the action of surrounding bodies than at a lower level, and their indications are consequently more uniform ; but according to Tyndall’s views they do not mark the temperature of the atmospheric stratum in which nearly all the vegetables useful to man, except forest trees, bud and blossom and ripen, and in which a vast majority of the ordinary operations of material life are performed. They give the rise and fall of the mercury at heights arbitrarily taken, without reference to the relations of temperature to human interests, or to any other scientific consideration than a somewhat less liability. to accidental disturbance. —_— 22 UNCERTAINTY OF MODERN METEOROLOGY. gauge above the earth is a point of much consequence in making estimates from its measurements.* The data from which results * Careful observations by the late lamented Dallas Bache appeared to show that there is no such difference in the quantity of precipitation falling at slightly different levels as has been generally supposed. The apparent differ- ence was ascribed by Prof. Bache to the irregular distribution of the drops of rain and flakes of snow, exposed, as they are, to local disturbances by the cur- rents of air around the corners of buildings or other accidents of the surface. Mr. Bache’s conclusions seem not to be accepted by some experimenters in England (see Quarterly Journal of Science for January, 1871, p. 128), but ac- cording to Greaves, President of the Meteorological Society (see Academy, 7th Dec., 1878, p. 547), the difference above alluded to is now generally ac- knowledged to be almost entirely due to the action of wind. The periodical Jature of Sept. 22, 1881, p. 495, also contains an article on Prof. Phillips’s observations of the rain-fall at Yorkminster, which appears to confirm this theory. The general conclusion of the article is in favor of Prof. Jevons’s views, announced in 1861, namely: that the phenomena observed were all consistent with the supposition that the fall of rain was practically identical at all elevations, the observed differences being due to imperfect collection by the gauges. Prof. Jevons’s theory is now almost universally adopted, and it shows the importance of great care in the selection of positions for rain- gauges; but in this theory he refers merely to the height of the gauge above the ground, and takes no notice of the remarkable difference of rain-fall ob- served at stations at very small distances from each other. Thus, by the Report of Dr. B. A. Gould, Director of the Observatory at Cordova, in the Argentine Confederation, it appears that at the house of the secretary, which is one mile distant from the Observatory, and 36.6 metres lower, during a period not given, but apparently of some months, a pluviom- eter, three and a half metres above the ground, showed a precipitation of 496.5 millimetres. The measured fall at the Observatory during the same period was 459.1 millimetres, showing a difference of eight per cent. in favor of the lower station. In a period of some weeks, a rain-gauge on the roof of a house near the Observatory, 4.02 metres above the standard instrument at the Observatory, registered 137.04 millimetres, the standard pluviometer 150 millimetres, a dif- ference of eight per cent. in favor of the lower station. The island of Mauritius, lying in the Indian Ocean in about 20° N. L., is less than forty miles long by about thirty in breadth. Its surface is very irregular, and though it consists, to a considerable extent, of a plateau from 1,200 to 1,500 feet high, there are three mountain peaks ranging from 2,300 to 2,700 feet in height. Hence, though the general climatic influences are everywhere substantially the same, there is room for a great variety of expos- ures and of other purely local conditions. It is said that the difference of temperature between the highest and lowest stations does not exceed eight degrees F., while, according to observations at thirty-five stations, the rain-fall in 1872 varied from thirty-three inches at Gros Cailloux to one hundred and UNCERTAINTY OF MODERN METEOROLOGY. 23 have been deduced with respect to the hygrometrical and ther- mometrical conditions, to the climate, in short, of different coun- tries, have very often been derived from observations at single points in cities or districts separated by considerable distances. The tendency of errors and accidents to balance each other au- thorizes us, indeed, to entertain greater confidence than we could otherwise feel in the conclusions drawn from such tables; but it is in the highest degree probable that they would be much modi- fied by more numerous series of observations at different stations within narrow limits.* forty-six inches at Cluny.—Watwre, September 24, 1874. This enormous dif- ference in measurement is too great to be explained by possible errors of ob- servation or other accidental circumstances, and we must suppose that there are, in different parts of this small island, great differences in the actual pre- cipitation, but still much of this variation must be due to causes whose range of influence is extremely limited In 1859 at Charleston, S. C., there fell at the U. 8. Arsenal, in a single rain- storm of an hour and a half, two inches of water; at the Register’s Office in the same city, at the distance of two miles from the Arsenal, the fall was but -one-third.of an inch. In the same year observations at three stations in the city of San Francisco, gave a total rain-fall of 16” 34; 25” 41; and 21” 39, respectively, and during the whole period from 1853 to 1860, the meteorological records at different ‘stations in the same city show similar discrepancies. See Smithsonian Contri- butions, Vol. XVIII., p. 148. Like differences are constantly found in the temperature registered at differ- ‘ent stations in the same vicinity, and it is obvious that in such cases no trust- worthy conclusions as to the general meteorology of territories of even very ‘small extent, can be obtained by mere averages of interpolations. As every astronomical observer has his personal, so every meteorological station has its local, equation, and the determination of these equations ought to be a cardinal object in every system of pluviometrical or thermometrical observations. Records of observations at the same hours and by the same methods, with the same or other carefully compared instruments, for a series of years, may authorize conclusions as to the essential or accidental climatic ‘conditions of that precise locality ; but in the present state of our knowledge, such records alone warrant no inference as to the meteorology of any other point, even within the distance of a mile, unless it may be in the case of observations with instruments absolutely insulated on great plains, or other- wise placed in exactly corresponding positions. Hence, until the equations ‘we speak of are ascertained, results deduced from the comparison of observa- tions made at different periods and at different stations can have no scientific value whatever. * The nomenclature of meteorology is vague and sometimes equivocal. Not long since, it was suspected that the observers reporting to a scientific institu- 24 UNCERTAINTY OF MODERN METEOROLOGY. There is one branch of research which is of the utmost import ance in reference to these questions, but which, from the great difficulty of direct observation upon it, has been less successfully studied than almost any other problem of physical science. I re- fer to the proportions between precipitation, superficial drainage, absorption and evaporation. Precise actual measurement of these quantities upon even a single acre of ground is impossible; and in all cabinet experiments on the subject, the conditions of the surface observed are so different from those which occur in na- ture, that we can not safely reason from one case to the other. In nature, the inclination and exposure of the ground, the degree tion did not agree in their understanding of the mode of expressing the direc- tion of the wind prescribed by their instructions. It was found, upon inquiry, that very many of them used the names of the compass-points to indicate the quarter from which the wind blew, while others employed them to signify the quarter towards which the atmospheric currents were moving. In some in- stances, the observers were no longer within the reach of inquiry, and of course their tables of the wind were of no value. “Winds,” says Mrs. Somerville, ‘‘are named from the points whence they blow, currents exactly the reverse. An easterly wind comes from the east ; whereas an easterly current comes from the west, and flows towards the east.”” —Physical Geography, p. 229. There is no philological ground for this distinction, and it probably orig- inated in a confusion of the terminations -wardly and -erly, both of which are modern. The root of the former ending implies the direction to or to-zwards which motion is supposed. It corresponds to, and is probably allied with, the Latin versus. The termination -erly is a corruption or softening of -ernly, easterly for easternly, and many authors of the seventeenth century so write it. In Hakluyt (i., p. 2), easterly is applied to place, ‘‘ easterly bounds,” and means eastern. Ina passage in Drayton, “‘ easterly winds” must mean winds. Srom the east ; but the same author, in speaking of nations, uses northerly for northern. WHakewell says: ‘‘ The sonne cannot goe more southernely from vs, nor come more northernely towards vs.” Holland, in his translation of Pliny, referring to the moon, has: ‘‘ When shee is northerly,” and ‘‘shee is gone southerly.” Richardson, to whom I am indebted for the above citations, quotes a passage from Dampier where westerly is applied to the wind, but the context does not determine the direction. The only example of the termina- tion in -wardly given by this lexicographer is from Donne, where it means towards the west. Shakspeare, in Hamlet (v., ii.), uses northerly wind for wind from the north. Milton does not employ either of these terminations, nor were they known to the Anglo-Saxons, who, however, had adjectives of direction in -an or -en, -ern and -weard, the last always meaning the point towards which motion is supposed, the others that from which it proceeds. The vocabulary of science has no specific name for one of the most import- UNCERTAINTY OF MODERN METEOROLOGY. 25 of freedom or obstruction of the flow of water over the surface, the composition and density of the soil, its temperature,* the dry- ness or saturation of the subsoil, the presence or absence of per- forations by worms and small burrowing quadrupeds—in short, | all the conditions upon which the permeability of the ground by -water and its power of absorbing and retaining or transmitting moisture depend—vary at comparatively short distances; and though the precipitation upon very small geographical basins and the superficial flow from them may be estimated with an approach to precision, yet even here we have no present means of knowing how much of the water absorbed by the earth is restored to the atmosphere by evaporation, and how much carried off by infiltra- tion or other modes of underground discharge. When, therefore, we attempt to use the phenomena observed on a few square or cubic yards of earth, as a basis of reasoning upon the meteorol- ant phenomena in meteorology—I mean for watery vapor condensed and ren- dered visible by cold. The Latins popularly expressed this condition of water by the word vapor. For iénvisible vapor natural philosophers used vapor and spiritus, but with a looseness corresponding to the vagueness of their ideas on the subject, and Van Helmont was obliged to invent a word, gas, as a scien- tific generic name for watery and other fluids in the invisible state. The mod- erns have perverted the familiar meaning of the word vapor, and in sciencc its use is confined to express water in the gaseous and invisible state. When vapor is rendered visible by condensation, we call it fog or mist if it is lying on or near the surface of the earth or of water; when it floats in the air we call it cloud ; but between these three words there is no clearly established distinction, for the condition of water in the ‘‘ swirling cloud” is the same as in the ‘‘ misty wreath.” They only express the form and position of the aque-° ous aggregation, not the condition of the water-globules which compose it. The breath from our mouths, the steam from an engine, thrown out into cold air, become visible, and consist of water in the same state as in fog or cloud ; but we do not apply those terms to these phenomena. It would be an improvement in meteorological nomenclature to restore vapor to its original popular meaning, and to employ a new word, such for example as hydrogas, fo express the new scientific idea of water in the invisible state. * Temperature, as conditioning the capillarity of rock and the hygroscopicity of earth, has not been much considered by physical inquirers, but it is cer- tainly an element of very great importance. See Sroppant, Geologia, I, § 600, 607. The instance of the foundry, where, when its floor of earth had received a great quantity of water by infiltration from a neighboring river at flood, almost the whole of the moisture was absorbed by the portions of the floor which had been heated by fires kindled upon it to dry the moulds, is very instructive. 26 STABILITY OF NATURE. ogy of a province, it is evident that our data must be insufficient to warrant positive general conclusions. In discussing the clima- tology of whole countries, or even of comparatively small local divisions, we may safely say that none can tell what percentage of the water they receive from the atmosphere is evaporated ; what absorbed by the ground and conveyed off by subterranean conduits; what carried down to the sea by superficial channels ; what drawn from the earth or the air by a given extent of forest, of short pasture vegetation, or of tall meadow-grass; what given out again by surfaces so covered, or by bare ground of various textures and composition, under different conditions of atmos- pheric temperature, pressure and humidity; or what is the amount of evaporation from water, ice or snow, under the vary- ing exposures to which, in actual nature, they are constantly sub- jected. If, then, we are so ignorant of all these climatic phe- nomena in the best-known regions inhabited by man, it is evi- dent that we can rely little upon theoretical deductions applied | to the former more natural state of the same regions—less still to ———— such as are adopted with respect to distant, strange and primitive countries. Stability of Nature. Nature, left undisturbed, so fashions her territory as to give it almost unchanging permanence of form, outline and proportion, -except when shattered by geologic convulsions; and in these comparatively rare cases of derangement, she sets herself at once to repair the superficial damage, and to restore, as nearly as prac- ticable, the former aspect of her dominion. In new countries, the natural inclination of the ground, the self-formed slopes and levels, are generally such as best secure the stability of the soil. They have been graded and lowered or elevated by frost and chemical forces and gravitation and the flow of water and vege- table deposit and the action of the winds, until, by a general com- pensation of conflicting forces, a condition of equilibrium has been reached which, without the action of man, would remain with little fluctuation for countless ages. We need not go far back to reach a period when, in all that portion of the North American continent which has been occu- pied by British colonization, the geographical elements very FORMATION OF BOGS. 27 nearly balanced and compensated each other. At the com- mencement of the seventeenth century, the soil, with insignifi- cant exceptions, was covered with forests;* and whenever the Indian, in consequence of war or the exhaustion of the beasts of the chase, abandoned the narrow fields he had planted and the woods he had burned over, they speedily returned, by a succes- sion of herbaceous, arborescent and arboreal growths, to their original state. Even a single generation sufliced to restore ees almost to their primitive luxuriance of forest vegetation.t The unbreken forests had attained to their maximum density and strength of growth, and, as the older trees decayed and fell, they were succeeded by new shoots or seedlings, so that from century to century no perceptible change seems to have occurred in the wood, except the slow, spontaneous succession of crops. This succession involved no interruption of growth, and but little break in the “boundless contiguity of shade”; for in the hus- bandry of nature there are no fallows. ‘Trees fall singly, not by square roods, and the tall pine is hardly prostrate, before the light and heat, admitted to the ground by the removal of the dense crown of foliage which had shut them out, stimulate the germi- nation of the seeds of broad-leaved trees that had lain, waiting this kindly influence, perhaps for centuries. Formation of Bogs.t Two natural causes, destructive in character, were, indeed, in operation in the primitive American forests, though, in the *T do not here speak of the vast prairie region of the Mississippi valley, which can not properly be said ever to have been a field of British coloniza- tion ; but of the original colonies and their dependencies in the territory of the present United States and in Canada. It is, however, equally true of the Western prairies as of the Eastern forest land, that they had arrived at a state of equilibrium, though under very different conditions. + The great fire of Miramichi in 1825, probably the most extensive and ter- rific conflagration recorded in authentic history, spread its ravages over nearly six thousand square miles, chiefly of woodland, and was of such intensity that it seemed to consume the very soil itself. But so great are the recuperative powers of nature, that, in twenty-five years, the ground was thickly covered again with trees of fair dimensions, except where cultivation and pasturage kept down the forest growth. ¢ The English nomenclature of this geographical feature does not seem well 28 FORMATION OF BOGS. Northern colonies at least, there were sufficient compensations ; for we do not discover that any considerable permanent change was produced by them. I refer to the action of beavers and of settled. We have bog, swamp, marsh, morass, moor, fen, turf-moss, peat-moss, quagmire, all of which, though sometimes more or less accurately discrimi- nated, are often used interchangeably, or are perhaps employed, each exclu- sively, in a particular district. In Sweden, where, especially in the Lappish provinces, this terraqueous formation is very extensive and important, the names of its different kinds are more specific in their application. The gen- eral designation of all soils permanently pervaded with water is Karr. The elder Leestadius divides the Karr into two genera: Myror (sing. myra), and Mossar (sing. mosse). ‘‘The former,” he observes, ‘‘ are grass-grown, and overflowed with water through almost the whole summer ; the latter are cov- ered with mosses and always moist, but very seldom overflowed.” He enu- merates the following species of Myra, the character of which will perhaps be sutliciently understood by the Latin terms into which he translates the ver- nacular names, for the benefit of strangers not altogether familiar with the lan- guage and the subject : 1. Hémyror, paludes graminosz. 2. Dy, paludes pro- funde. 38. Flarkmyror, or proper karr, paludes limose. 4. Hydlimyror, paludes uliginose. 5. Tufmyror, paludes cespitose. 6. Rismyror, paludes virgate. 7. Starrdngar, prata irrigata, with their subdivisions, dry starrdn- gar or risingar, wet starrdngar and frakengropar. 8. Pélar, lacune. 9. Gé- lar, fosse inundate. The Mossar, paludes turfose, which are of great extent, have but two species: 1. Zorfmossar, called also Mossmyror and Snottermyror, and, 2. Bjornmossar. The accumulations of stagnant or stagnating water originating in bogs are distinguished into Zrdsk, stagna, and Tjernar or Tjdrnar (sing. Tjern or Tjdrn), stagnatiles. TJrdsk are pools fed by bogs, or water emanating from them, and their bottoms are slimy; Zjernar are small 7rdsk situated within the limits of Mossar.—L. L. Lastaptius, om Méjligheten af Uppodlingar Lappmarken, pp. 28, 24. Although the quantity of bog land in New England is less than in many other regions of equal area, yet there is a considerable extent of this formation in some of the Northeastern States. Dana (Manual of Geology, p. 614) states that the quantity of peat in Massachusetts is estimated at 120,000,000 cords, or nearly 569,000,000 cubic yards, but he does not give either the area or the depth of the deposits. In any event, however, bogs cover but a small percentage of the territory in any of the Northern States, while it is said that one-tenth of the whole surface of Ireland is composed of bogs, 3,000,000 acres of which are peat-bogs, these being sometimes 40 feet thick, and there are still extensive tracts of undrained marsh in England. The amount of this formation in Great Britain has been estimated at 6,000,000 acres, with an average depth of twelve feet, which would yield 21,600,000 tons of air-dried peat.—AsBJORN- sEN, Jorv og Torvdrift, Christiana, 1868, p. 6. But more recent investigations greatly raise this estimate. Peat beds have sometimes a thickness of ten or twelve yards, or even more. A depth of ten yards would give 48,400 cubic yards to the acre. The greatest FORMATION OF BOGS. 29 fallen trees in producing bogs, and of smaller animals, insects, and birds, in destroying the woods.* VA Bogs generally originate in the checking of watercourses by the falling of timber or of earth and rocks, or by artificial ob-— structions across their channels. If the impediment is sufficient | to retain a permanent accumulation of water behind it, the trees — whose roots are overflowed soon perish, and then by their fall increase the obstruction, and, of course, occasion a still wider spread of the stagnating stream. This process goes on until the water finds a new outlet, at a higher level, not lable to similar interruption. The fallen trees not completely covered by water are soon overgrown with mosses; aquatic and semi-aquatic plants propagate themselves, and spread until they more or less com- pletely fill up the space occupied by the water, and the surface ‘quantity of firewood yielded by the forests of New England to the acre is 100 cords solid measure, or 474 cubic yards; but this comprises only the trunks and larger branches. If we add the small branches and twigs, it is possible that 600 cubic yards might, in some cases, be cut on an acre. This is only one-eightieth part of the quantity of peat sometimes found on the same area. It is true that a yard of peat and a yard of wood are not the equivalents of each other, but the fuel on an acre of deep peat is worth much more than that on an acre of the best woodland. Besides this, wood is perishable, and the quan- tity on an acre can not be increased beyond the amount just stated; peat is indestructible, and the beds are always growing. See post, Chap. IV. Cold favors the conversion of aquatic vegetables into peat. Asbjérnsen says some of the best peat he has met with is from a bog which is frozen for forty weeks in the year. The Greeks and Romans were not acquainted with the employment of peat as fuel, but it appears from a curious passage which I have already cited from Pliny, V. H., book xvi., chap. 1, that the inhabitants of the North Sea coast used what is called kneaded turf in his time. This is the finer and more thor- oughly decomposed matter lying at the bottom of the peat, kneaded by the hands, formed into small blocks and dried. It is still prepared in precisely the same way by the poorer inhabitants of those shores. But though the Low German tribes, including probably the Anglo-Saxons, have used peat as fuel from time immemorial, it appears not to have been known to the High Germans until a recent period. At least, I can find neither in Old nor in Middle High German lexicons and glossaries any word signifying peat. Zurb indeed is found in Graff as an Old High German word, but only in the sense of grass-turf, or greensward. Peat bogs of vast extent occur in many High German localities, but the former abundance of wood in the same regions rendered the use of peat unnecessary. * See Chapter II., post. (2 30 FORMATION OF BOGS. is gradually converted from a pond to a quaking morass. The morass is slowly solidified by vegetable production and deposit, then very often restored to the forest condition by the growth of black ashes, cedars, or, in southern latitudes, cypresses and other trees suited to such a soil, and thus the interrupted harmony of nature is at last re-established.* In countries somewhat further advanced in civilization than those occupied by the North American Indians, as in medieval Ireland, the formation of bogs may be commenced by the neglect of man to remove, from the natural channels of superficial drain- age, the tops and branches of trees felled for the various purposes to which wood is applicable in his rude industry; and, when the flow of the water is thus checked, nature goes on with the processes I have already described. In such half-civilized regions, too, wind-falls are more frequent than in those where the forest is unbroken, because, when openings have been made in it for agri- cultural or other purposes, the entrance thus afforded to the wind occasions the sudden overthrow of hundreds of trees which might otherwise have stood for generations, and which would then have fallen to the ground only one by one, as natural decay brought them down.t Besides this, the flocks bred by man in the pas- *«« Aquatic plants have a utility in raising the level of marshy grounds, which renders them very valuable, and may well be called a geological func- BOTS seine ‘«The engineer drains ponds at a great expense by lowering the surface of the water; nature attains the same end, gratuitously, by raising the level of the soil without depressing that of the water; but she proceeds more slowly. There are, in the Landes, marshes where this natural filling has a thickness of four métres, and some of them, at first lower than the sea, have been thus raised and drained so as to grow summer crops, such, for example, as maize.” —Bortre., Mise en valeur des Terres pauvres, p. 227. The bogs of Denmark—the examination of which by Steenstrup and Vaupell has presented such curious results with respect to the natural succession of forest trees—appear to have gone through this gradual process of drying, and the birch, which grows freely in very wet soils, has contributed very effectu- ally by its annual deposits to raise the surface above the water level, and thus to prepare the ground for the oak.— VAUPELL, Bégens Indvandring, pp. 89, 40. The growth of the peat not unfrequently raises the surface of bogs consid- erably above the level of the surrounding country, and these sometimes burst and overflow lower grounds with a torrent of mud and water as destructive as a current of lava. + Careful examination of the peat mosses in North Sjelland—which are se GEOGRAPHICAL CHANGE. 31 toral state keep down the incipient growth of trees on the half- dried bogs, and prevent them from recovering their primitive condition. Young trees in the native forest are sometimes girdled and killed by the smaller rodent quadrupeds, and their growth is checked by birds which feed on the terminal bud; but these ani- mals, as we shall see, are generally found on the skirts of the wood only, not in its deeper recesses, and hence the mischief they do is not extensive. In fine, in countries untrodden by man, the proportions and relative positions of land and water, the atmospheric precipitation and evaporation, the thermometric mean, and the distribution of vegetable and animal life, are maintained by natural compensa- tions, in a state of approximate equilibrium, and are subject to | appreciable change only from geological influences so slow in their operation that the geographical conditions may be regarded | as substantially constant and immutable. Natural Conditions favorable to Geographical Change. There are, nevertheless, certain climatic conditions and certain forms and formations of terrestrial surface, which tend respects ively to impede and to facilitate the physical degradation both of new countries and of old. If the precipitation, whether great or small in amount, be equally distributed through the seasons, so that there are neither torrential rains nor parching droughts, and if, further, the general inclination of ground be moderate, so that the superficial waters are carried off without destructive rapidity of flow, and without sudden accumulation in the channels of nat- ural drainage, there is little danger of the degradation of the soil in consequence of the removal of forest or other vegetable cover- ing, and the natural face of the earth may be considered as virtu- ally permanent. These conditions are well exemplified in Ire land, in a great part of England, in extensive districts in Ger- many and France, and, fortunately, in an immense proportion of abundant in fossil wood that within thirty years they have yielded above a million of trees—shows that the trees have generally fallen from age and not from wind. They are found in depressions on the declivities of which they grew, and they lie with the top lowest, always falling towards the bottom of the valley.-VAUPELL, Bégens Indvandring i de Danske Skove, pp. 10, 14. 32 GEOGRAPHICAL CHANGE. the valley of the Mississippi and the basin of the great American lakes, as well as in many parts of the continents of South Ameri- ca and of Africa; and it is partly, though by no means entirely, owing to topographical and climatic causes that the blight, which has smitten the fairest and most fertile provinces of Imperial Rome, has spared Britannia, Germania, Pannonia and Meesia, the com- paratively inhospitable homes of barbarous races, who, in the days of the Czesars, were too little advanced in civilized life to possess either the power or the will to wage that war against the order of nature which seems, hitherto, an almost inseparable condition pre- cedent of high social culture and of great progress in fine and mechanical art. Destructive changes are most frequent in countries of irregular and mountainous surface, and in climates where the precipitation is confined chiefly to a single season, and where, of course, the year is divided into a wet and a dry period, as is the case through- out a great part of the Ottoman empire, and indeed in a large proportion of the whole Mediterranean basin. In mountainous countries various causes combine to expose the soil to constant dangers. The rain and snow usually fall in great- _er quantity, and with much inequality of distribution; the snow on the summits accumulates for many months in succession, and then is not unfrequently almost wholly dissolved in a single thaw, so that the entire precipitation of months is in a few hours hur- ried down the flanks of the mountains, and through the ravines that furrow them; the natural inclination of the surface promotes the swiftness of the gathering currents of diluvial rain and of melting snow, which soon acquire an almost irresistible force and power of removal and transportation ; the soil itself is less com- pact and tenacious than that of the plains, and if the sheltering forest has been destroyed, it is confined by few of the threads and ligaments by which nature had bound it together and attached it to the rocky groundwork. Hence every considerable shower lays bare its roods of rock, and the torrents sent down by the thaws of spring, and by occasional heavy discharges of the summer and autumnal rains, are seas of mud and rolling stones that sometimes lay waste and bury beneath them acres, and even miles, of pas- ture and field and vineyard.* * The character of geological formation is an element of very great import- DESTRUOTIVENESS OF MAN. 33 Destructiveness of Man. Man. has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste. Nature has provided against the absolute destruction of any of her elementary matter, the raw material of her works; the thun- derbolt and the tornado, the most convulsive throes of even the vol- cano and the earthquake, being only phenomena of decomposition and recomposition. But she has left it within the power of man irreparably to derange the combinations of inorganic matter and of organic life, which through the night of eons she had been proportioning and balancing, to prepare the earth for his habitation, when in the fulness of time his Creator should call him forth to enter into its possession. Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic world are, as I have remarked, bound together by such mutual relations and adaptations as secure, if not the absolute per- manence and equilibrium of both, a long continuance of the established conditions of each at any given time and place, or at | least, a very slow and gradual succession of changes in those con- ditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. The proportions and accommodations which insured the stability of existing arrangements are overthrown. Indigenous vegetable and animal species are extirpated, and supplanted by others of foreign origin, spontaneous production is forbidden or restricted, and the face of the earth is either laid bare or covered with a new and reluctant growth of vegetable forms and with alien tribes of animallife. These intentional changes and substitutions constitute, indeed, great revolutions; but vast as is their magnitude and im- ance in determining the amount of erosion produced by running water, and, of course, in measuring the consequences of clearing off the forests. The soil of the French Alps yields very readily to the force of currents, and the decliv- ities of the northern Apennines, as well as of many minor mountain ridges in Tuscany and other parts of Italy, are covered with earth which becomes itself almost a fluid when saturated with water. Hence the erosion of such sur- faces is vastly greater than on many other mountains of equal steepness of inclination. The traveller who passes over the route between Bologna and Florence, and the Perugia and the Siena roads from the latter city to Rome, will have many opportunities of observing such localities. 2% 34 DESTRUOCTIVENESS OF MAN. portance, they are, as we shall see, insignificant in comparison with the contingent and unsought results which have flowed from them. The fact that, of all organic beings, man alone is to be regarded as essentially a destructive power, and that he wields energies to resist which Nature—that nature whom all material life and all inorganic substance obey—is wholly impotent, tends to prove that, though living in physical nature, he is not of her, that he is of more exalted parentage, and belongs to a higher order of ex- istences, than those which are born of her womb and live in blind submission to her dictates. There are, indeed, brute destroyers, beasts and birds and insects of prey—all animal life feeds upon, and, of course, destroys other | life,—but this destruction is balanced by compensations. It is, in fact, the very means by which the existence of one tribe of ani- mals or of vegetables is secured against being smothered by the en- croachments of another; and the reproductive powers of species which serve as the food of others are always proportioned to the , demand they are destined to supply. Man pursues his victims \ with reckless destructiveness; and while the sacrifice of life by the lower animals is limited by the cravings of appetite, he un- sparingly persecutes, even to extirpation, thousands of organic ‘ forms which he can not consume.* | * The terrible destructiveness of man is remarkably exemplified in the chase of large mammalia and birds, for single products, attended with the entire waste of enormous quantities of flesh and of other parts of the animal which jare capable of valuable uses. The wild cattle of South America are slaugh- tered by millions, for their hides and horns ; the buffalo of North America, for his skin or his tongue; the elephant, the walrus, and the narwhal, for their tusks ; the cetacea, and some other marine animals, for their whalebone and oil; the ostrich and other large birds, for their plumage. Within a few years, sheep have been killed in New England, by whole flocks, for their pelts and suet alone, the flesh being thrown away ; and it is even said that the bodies of the same quadrupeds have been used in Australia as fuel for limekilns. What a vast amount of human nutriment, of bone, and of other animal products valuable in the arts, is thus recklessly squandered! In nearly all these cases, the part which constitutes the motive for this wholesale destruction, and is alone saved, is essentially of insignificant value as compared with what is thrown away. The horns and hide of an ox are not economically worth a tenth part as much as the entire carcass. During the present year, large quan- tities of Indian corn have been used as domestic fuel, and even for burning DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 35: The earth was not, in its natural condition, completely adapted to the use of man, but only to the sustenance of wild animals and wild vegetation. These live, multiply their kind in just propor- tion, and attain their perfect measure of strength and beauty, lime, in Iowa and other Western States. Corn at from fifteen to eighteen cents per bushel is found cheaper than wood at from five to seven dollars per cord, or coal at six or seven dollars per ton.—Rep. Agric. Dept., Nov. and Dec., 1872, p. 487. One of the greatest benefits to be expected from the improvements of civil- ization is, that increased facilities of communication will render it possible to) transport to places of consumption much valuable material that is now wasted because the price at the nearest market will not pay freight. The cattle slaughtered in South America for their hides would feed millions of the starv- ing population of the Old World, if their flesh could be economically preserved and transported across the ocean. This indeed is already done, but on a scale which, though absolutely considerable, is relatively insignificant. South America sends to Europe a certain quantity of nutriment in the form of meat extracts, Liebig’s and others; and preserved flesh from Australia is begin- ning to figure in the English market. [Since the above paragraph was written the transportation of fresh meat from distant countries to England has been attended with remarkable success, A single ship is said on good authority to have brought from New Zealand to England, in the spring of 1882, the flesh of 5,000 sheep in perfectly good con- dition. The course of this vessel necessarily lay across the tropics, and her delicate freight sustained no injury whatever from the great heat to which she was exposed. By means of a refrigerating apparatus the meat was kept at a temperature near or at the freezing point. ] A very important recent economy is the utilization of those portions of cer- tain agricultural products that were formerly treated as mere refuse. The cot- ton-growing States in America produce annually about three million tons of cotton seed. This until very recently has been thrown away as a useless in- cumbrance, but it is now valued at from ten to twelve dollars per ton for the cotton fibre which adheres to it, for the oil extracted from it, and for the feed which it afterwards furnishes to cattle. The oil—which may be described as neutral—is used very largely for mixing with other oils, many of which bear a large proportion of it without injury to their special properties. The sansa, or pulp of the olive remaining after the oil has been expressed, until very re- cently considered worthless except as manure, is now found to be capable of yielding, by a different treatment, a considerable quantity of oil and some other valuable products. Even the waste from silk manufactories, and the shreds and fragments from the shops of modistes, formerly thrown away as useless, are now carefully saved. A long series of costly experiments has led to the invention of processes for reducing all this material to a fibrous condi- tion, and for re-spinning and weaving it into every possible tissue. The opera tion is carried on in England on a scale of really great industrial importance. The substitution of expensive machinery for manual labor, even in agricul- 36 DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. without producing or requiring any important change in the nat- aral arrangements of surface or in each other’s spontaneous tend- encies, except such mutual repression of excessive increase as may prevent the extirpation of one species by the encroachments ture—not to speak of older and more familiar applications—besides being highly remunerative, has better secured the harvests, and it is computed thas the 230,000 threshing machines used in the United States in 1870 obtained five per cent. more grain from the sheaves which passed through them than could have been secured by the use of the flail. We are also beginning to learn a better economy in dealing with the inor- ganic world. The utilization—or, as the Germans more happily call it, the Verwerthung, the beworthing—of waste from metallurgical, chemical and manufacturing establishments, is among the most important results of the application of science to industrial purposes. The incidental products from the laboratories of. manufacturing chemists often become more valuable than those for the preparation of which they were erected. The slags from silver refineries, and even from smelting houses of the coarser metals, have not un- frequently yielded to a second operator a better return than the first had de- rived from dealing with the natural ore ; and the saving of lead carried off in the smoke of furnaces has, of itself, given a large profit on the capital invested in the works. According to Ure’s Dictionary of Arts, see vol. ii., p. 882, an English miner has constructed flues five miles in length for the condensation of the smoke from his lead-works, and makes thereby an annual saving of metal to the value of ten thousand pounds sterling. A few years ago, an officer of an American mint was charged with embezzling gold committed to him for coinage. He insisted, in his defence, that much of the metal was volatilized and lost in refining and melting, and upon scraping the chimneys of the melting furnaces and the roofs of the adjacent houses, gold enough was found in the soot to account for no small part of the deficiency. It is familiarly known that the sweepings of gold and silver smiths’ shops have a regular market value. It is worth noticing that the ‘“‘sweep” of the British mint in 1878 yielded L. 2,995, 8, 3. There are still, however, cases of enormous waste in many mineral and me- chanical industries. Thus, while in many European countries common salt is a government monopoly, and consequently so dear that the poor do not use as much of it as health requires, in others, as in Transylvania, where it is quar- ried like stone, the large blocks only are saved, the fragments, to the amount of millions of hundredweights, being thrown away.—BonER, Transylvania, p. 455, 6. One of the most interesting and important branches of economy at the pres- ent day is the recovery of agents such as ammonia and others which had been utilized in chemical manufactures, and re-employed them indefinitely after wards in repeating the same process. Among the supplemental exhibitions which will be formed in connection with the Vienna Universal Exhibition is to be one showing what steps have been DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 37 of another. In short, without man, lower animal and sponta- } neous vegetable life would have been practically constant in type, distribution and proportion, and the physical geography of the | earth would have remained undisturbed for indefinite periods, and been subject to revolution only from slow development, from possible unknown cosmical causes, or from geological action. ' But man, the domestic animals that serve him, the field and garden plants the products of which supply him with food and clothing, can not subsist and rise to the full development of their higher properties, unless brute and unconscious nature be effect- ually combated, and, in a great degree, vanquished by human art. Hence, a certain measure of transformation of terrestrial surface, of suppression of natural, and stimulation of artificially modified productivity becomes necessary. This measure man has unfortunately exceeded. He has felled the forests whose net- work of fibrous roots bound the mould to the rocky skeleton of the earth; but had he allowed here and there a belt of woodland to reproduce itself by spontaneous propagation, most of the mis- chiefs which his reckless destruction of the natural protection of the soil has occasioned would have been averted. He has broken up the mountain reservoirs, the percolation of whose waters through unseen channels supplied the fountains that refreshed his cattle and fertilized his fields; but he has neglected to main- tain the cisterns and the canals of irrigation which a wise antiq- uity had constructed to neutralize the consequences of its own imprudence. While he has torn the thin glebe which confined the light earth of extensive plains, and has destroyed the fringe of semi-aquatic plants which skirted the coast and checked the drifting of the sea sand, he has failed to prevent the spreading of the dunes by clothing them with artificially propagated vegeta- tion. He has ruthlessly warred on all the tribes of animated na- ture whose spoil he could convert to his own uses, and he has not taken since 1851 (the date of the first London Exhibition) in the utilization of substances previously regarded as waste. On the one hand will be shown the waste products in all the industrial processes included in the forthcoming Exhibition ; on the other hand, the useful products which have been obtained. from such wastes since 1851. This is intended to serve as an incentive to fur- ther researches in the same important direction. 38 DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. protected the birds which prey on the insects most destructive to his own harvests. Purely untutored humanity, it is true, interferes comparatively little with the arrangements of nature,* and the destructive *Tt is an interesting and not hitherto sufficiently noticed fact, that the do- mestication of the organic world, so far as it has yet been achieved, belongs, not indeed to the savage state, but to the earliest dawn of civilization ; the con- quest of inorganic nature, almost as exclusively to the most advanced stages of artificial culture. Civilization has added little to the number of vegetable or animal species grown in our fields or bred in our folds—the cranberry and the wild grape being almost the only plants which the Anglo-American has re- claimed out of our vast native flora and added to his harvests—while, on the con- trary, the subjugation of the inorganic forces, and the consequent extension of man’s sway over, not the annual products of the earth only, but her substance and her springs of action, is almost entirely the work of highly refined and cultivated ages. The employment of the elasticity of wood and of horn, as a projectile power in the bow, is nearly universal among the rudest savages. The application of compressed air to the same purpose in the blowpipe is more restricted, and the use of the mechanical powers, the inclined plane, the wheel and axle, and even the wedge and lever, seems almost unknown except to civilized man. I have myself seen European peasants to whom one of the simplest applications of this latter power was a revelation. It is familiarly known to all who have occupied themselves with the psy- chology and habits of the ruder races, and of persons with imperfectly developed intellects in civilized life, that although these humble tribes and individuals sacrifice, without scruple, the lives of the lower animals to the gratification of their appetites and the supply of their other physical wants, yet they neverthe- less seem to cherish with brutes, and even with vegetable life, sympathies which are much more feebly felt by civilized men. May we not ascribe to this sympathy the fact that Homer does not refer to the ass as a type of stu- pidity, nor to the swine as an example of uncleanness? The father of Ulysses is called the god-like swineherd. The popular traditions of the simpler peoples recognize a certain community of nature between man, brute animals, and even plants; and this serves to explain why the apologue or fable, which ascribes the power of speech and the faculty of reason to birds, quadrupeds, insects, flowers and trees, is one of the earliest forms of literary composition. In almost every wild tribe, some particular quadruped or bird, though per- secuted as a destroyer of other animals more useful to man, or hunted for food, is regarded with peculiar respect, one might almost say, affection. The Ainos, after killing a bear, sit round the body in great solemnity, as if wor- shipping, and offer it food and drink. Some of the North American aborigi- nal nations celebrate a propitiatory feast to the manes of the intended victim before they commence a bear-hunt; and the Norwegian peasantry have not only retained an old proverb which ascribes to the same animal ‘‘t Mands Styrke og tolv Mands Vid,” ten men’s strength and twelve men’s cunning, but DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 39 agency of man becomes more and more energetic and unsparing } as he advances in civilization, until the impoverishment, with | which his exhaustion of the natural resources of the soil is threat- | ening him, at last awakens him to the necessity of preserving what \ is left, if not of restoring what has been wantonly wasted. The they still pay to him something of the reverence with which ancient supersti- tion invested him. The student of Icelandic literature will find in the saga of Finnbogi hinn rami a curious illustration of this feeling, in an account of a dialogue between a Norwegian bear and an Icelandic champion—dumb show on the part of Bruin, and chivalric words on that of Finnbogi—followed by a duel, in which the latter, who had thrown away his arms and armor in order that the combatants might meet on equal terms, was victorious. See also Frus, Lappisk Mythologi, Christiania, 1871, § 37, and the earlier authors there cited. Drummond Hay’s very interesting work on Morocco contains many amusing notices of a similar feeling entertained by the Moors towards the re- ‘doubtable enemy of their flocks—the lion. This sympathy helps us to understand how it is that most if not all the do- mestic animals—if indeed they ever existed in a wild state—were appropriated, reclaimed and trained before men had been gathered into organized and fixed communities, that almost every known esculent plant had acquired substan- tially its present artificial character, and that the properties of nearly all vege- table drugs and poisons were known at the remotest period to which historical records reach. Did nature bestow upon primitive man some instinct akin to that by which she has been supposed to teach the brute to select the nutritious and to reject the noxious vegetables indiscriminately mixed in forest and pasture ? This instinct, it must be admitted, is far from infallible, and, as has been hundreds of times remarked by naturalists, it is in many cases not an original faculty but an acquired and transmitted habit. It is a fact familiar to persons engaged in sheep husbandry in New England—and I have seen it confirmed by personal observation—that sheep bred where the common laurel, as it is called, Kalmia angustifolia, abounds, almost always avoid browsing upon the leaves of that plant, while those brought from districts where laurel is unknown, and turned into pastures where it grows, very often feed upon it and are poisoned by it. A curious acquired and hereditary instinct, of a different character, may not improperly be noticed here. I refer to that by which horses bred in provinces where quicksands are common avoid their dangers or extricate them- selves from them. See Br&montier, Mémoire sur les Dunes, Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1833: premier sémestre, pp. 155-157. It is commonly said in New England, and I believe with reason, that the crows of this generation are wiser than their ancestors. Scarecrows which were effectual fifty years ago are no longer respected by the plunderers of the cornfield, and new terrors must from time to time be invented for its protec- tion. Schroeder van der Kolk, in Het Verschil tusschen den Psychischen Aanleg van — ew cee | ee 40 HUMAN AND BRUTE ACTION COMPARED. wandering savage grows no cultivated vegetable, fells no forest, and extirpates no useful plant, no noxious weed. If his skill in the chase enables him to entrap numbers of the animals on which he feeds, he compensates this loss by destroying also the lion, the tiger, the wolf, the otter, the seal, and the eagle, thus indirectly protecting the feebler quadrupeds and fish and fowls, which would otherwise become the booty of beasts and birds of prey. But with stationary life, or at latest with the pastoral state, man at once commences an almost indiscriminate warfare upon all the forms of animal and vegetable existence around him, and as he advances in civilization, he gradually eradicates or transforms every spontaneous product of the soil he occupies.* Human and Brute Action Compared. It is maintained by authorities as high as any known to modern science, that the action of man upon nature, though greater in degree, does not differ in kind from that of wild animals. It is het Dier en van den Mensch, cites many interesting facts respecting instincts lost, or newly developed and become hereditary, in the lower animals, and he quotes Aristotle and Pliny as evidence that the common quadrupeds and fowls of our fields and our poultry yards were much less perfectly domesticated in their times than long, long ages of servitude have now made them. Among other instances of obliterated instincts, this author states that in Holland, where, for centuries, the young of the cow has been usually taken from the dam at birth and fed by hand, calves, even if left with the mother, make no attempt to suck; while in England, where calves are not weaned until several weeks old, they resort to the udder as naturally as the young of wild quadrupeds.—Zel en Ligchaam, p. 128, n. Perhaps the half-wild character ascribed by P. Lestadius and other Swedish writers to the reindeer of Lapland, may be in some degree due to the compara- tive shortness of the period during which he has been partially tamed. The domestic swine bred in the woods of Hungary, and the buffalo of Southern Italy, are so wild and savage as to be very dangerous to all but their keepers. The former have relapsed into their original condition, the latter, perhaps, have never been fully reclaimed from it. * The difference between the relations of savage life and of incipient civil- ization to nature, is well seen in that part of the valley of the Mississippi which was once occupied by the mound builders and afterwards by the far less de- veloped Indian tribes. When the tillers of the fields which must have been cultivated to sustain the large population that once inhabited those regions, per- ished or were driven out, the soil fell back to the normal forest state, and the savages who succeeded the more advanced race interfered very little, if at all, with the ordinary course of spontaneous nature HUMAN AND BRUTE ACTION COMPARED. 41 perhaps impossible to establish a radical distinction a genere be- tween the two classes of effects, but there is an essential difference between the motive of action which calls out the energies of civ- ilized man and the mere appetite which controls the life of the beast. The action of man, indeed, is frequently followed by un- foreseen and undesired results, yet it is nevertheless guided by a self-conscious will aiming as often at secondary and remote as at immediate objects. The wild animal, “on the other hand, acts in- stinctively, and, so far as we are lk to perceive, ee with a view to single an direct purposes. The backwoodsman and the beaver alice fell trees; the man, that he may convert the forest into an olive grove that will mature its fruit only for a succeed- ing generation ; the beaver, that he may feed upon the bark of the trees or use them in the construction of his habitation. The ac- tion of brutes upon the material world is slow and gradual, and usually limited, in any given case, to a narrow extent of territory. Nature is allowed time and opportunity to set her restorative powers at work, and the destructive animal has hardly retired from the field of his ravages before nature has repaired the dam- ages occasioned by his operations. In fact, he is expelled from the scene by the very efforts which she makes for the restoration of her dominion. Man, on the contrary, extends his action over vast spaces, his revolutions are swift and radical, and his devasta- tions are, for an almost incalculable time after he has withdrawn the arm that gave the blow, irreparable. The form of geographical surface, and very probably the cli- mate, of a given country, depend much on the character of the vegetable life belonging to it. Man has, by domestication, greatly, changed the habits and properties of the plants he rears; he has- by voluntary selection, immensely modified the forms and quali- ties of the animated creatures that serve him; and he has, at the same time, completely rooted out many forms of animal if not of vegetable being.* What is there in the influence of brute life * Whatever may be thought of the modification of organic species by nat- ural selection, there is certainly no evidence that animals have exerted upon any form of life an influence analogous to that of domestication upon plants, quadrupeds and birds reared artificially by man ; and this is as true of unfore- seen as of purposely effected improvements accomplished by voluntary selec- tion of breeding animals. It is true that nature employs birds and quadrupeds for the dissemination of om - - —— 42 HUMAN AND BRUTE ACTION COMPARED. that corresponds to this? We have no reason to believe that, in that portion of the American continent which, though peopled by many tribes of quadruped and fowl, remained uninhabited by man or only thinly occupied by purely savage tribes, any sensible geographical change had occurred within twenty centuries before the epoch of discovery and colonization, while, during the same period, man had changed millions of square miles, in the fairest and most fertile regions of the Old World, into the barrenest deserts. The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and de- stroy the balance which nature had established between her or- ganized and her inorganic creations, and she avenges herself upon the intruder, by letting loose upon her defaced provinces de- structive energies hitherto kept in check by organic forces des- tined to be his best auxiliaries, but which he has unwisely dis- persed and driven from the field of action. When the forest is gone, the great reservoir of moisture stored up in its vegetable mould is evaporated, and returns only in deluges of rain to wash away the parched dust into which that mould has been converted. The well-wooded and humid hills are turned to ridges of dry rock, which encumber the low grounds and choke the water- courses with their débris, and—except in countries favored with an equable distribution of rain through the seasons, and a moder- ate and regular inclination of surface—the whole earth, unless rescued by human art from the physical degradation to which it tends, becomes an assemblage of bald mountains, of barren, turf- less hills, and of swampy and malarious plains. There are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece, and even of