EARTH, AIR, AND WATER IN RELATION TO MAN--HOW MODIFIED BY
HIM--RESULTS OF THAT MODIFICATION--ACTION AND REACTION.
§ 1. The question of acclimation is not confined merely to man’s
transfer from one country to another, and to his attempts to
accommodate himself to the new locality, to the altered circumstances
of his adopted country. As civilized man traverses the earth in
search of new abodes, he carries with him the arts of social life,
and especially the art of agriculture, by which alone he can exist in
congregated masses: agriculture, which forms indeed the very basis of
civilization.
Whether we view man as a native of the land or a stranger, he cannot
evade this question; for even as a native and as an individual of a
race whose presence on the soil he may inhabit precedes the records
of authentic history, if he form a portion of civilized society he
receives from his ancestors or predecessors a system he is bound to
improve, or at least to maintain, so that he shall live and thrive,
not as the beasts of the field, but as a member of a civilized people.
When a hunting tribe of North American Indians, a horde of Bedouins,
or Hottentots or Caffres, a Turcoman family, or a gipsy encampment,
a Cape Boer, or an Australian sheep-farmer, sit down by stream, or
valley, or lake, they no more influence the soil than a troop of
antelopes or buffaloes. Nature’s great processes go on unaffected:
they deteriorate, it is true, by respiration, the superincumbent
atmosphere, but not more than any equal amount of animal life. This
deterioration the wild plants around, sown by nature herself, speedily
removes; the oxygen consumed by savage man and the animal life around,
equally wild, is speedily renovated by vegetation, and the oxygen they
remove from the atmosphere and the carbonic acid they pour into it,
rapidly and constantly recover their equilibrium under the influence
of vegetation. Thus, neither the earth (soil), air, nor water, is in
any way influenced by his presence, nor is he in general affected by
these; there is no reciprocal influence for good or bad: he cuts down
no forests, grows no wheat, or but little, makes no canals, drains
no marsh-lands, poisons no rivers; the refuse of his dwellings, the
excreta of such a population, are not sensibly perceived, even if
allowed to rot and waste away on the surface--a practice prevalent with
most if not all wild and uncultivated people; it rapidly disappears,
disintegrated by processes in which the lower forms of animal life take
a part. Now, contemplate the picture civilized man presents, and see
him in direct antagonism with nature! The plants of nature’s sowing are
rudely torn up with the plough and destroyed, the fields are forced to
yield crops by which he lives, and what he takes from the soil must,
to use the language of chemists, “be restored to it:” the excreta of
man and animals, the refuse of dwellings, the deteriorated and poisoned
liquids, the products of manufactories, are collected into heaps, to
rot on the surface of the soil, before being dug into it; or are thrown
into the rivers, to poison, in a certain sense, the waters on which
man lives, rendering their banks, if not pestilential, at least most
unpleasant as human abodes; canals are dug, vast reservoirs are formed,
which in time give rise by mismanagement to fevers, intermittent and
others; the minerals of the earth are quarried and placed on the
soil, mines are dug, and from them waters are discharged into the
neighbouring streams, strongly poisoned with the metallic ores. To
imagine that an influence thus affecting earth, air, and water can
proceed and increase without affecting human life, can be overcome by
habit, does not require to be met by counter-influences originating in
the experience and reasoning of man himself, is a supposition which the
history of large cities refutes. The influence is reciprocal. When man
thus acts on the three elements of nature by which he lives, they react
on him, and it is this reaction he is called on to meet and to overcome
as best he can. It is a question of reason and experiment--that is, of
science and of simple observation; simple observation and experiment
taught the native Peruvians the value of guano, for science had at
that time no standing on the American continent; and now the chemist
steps in and explains why it was that the experiment proved successful.
Whether his explanation be satisfactory or not, touches not the
question; though proved to be erroneous in a single instance, as it
possibly is in regard of this very Peruvian guano, science stands on
too secure a basis to require any defence from me.
It is one of the conditions of civilization, that man must everywhere
accept the social system within which he lives. Whether a dweller in
detached cottages and farm-houses, or congregated into townships and
villages; collected in masses, as in towns and cities, his endeavour is
to protect his dwelling from all that is offensive and from whatever
may prove injurious to the health of himself and family. An ancient
adage tells us not to act contrary to nature; but as nature reveals
nothing to us, as her intentions can only be read by the lights of
science and reason, or science based on observation and experiment,
whence human reason draws deductions conformable with its power, so
is it most difficult for man to say what is best to be done under all
circumstances. When a man builds a cottage, a house, or a palace, after
duly attending to the surface-drains, he constructs near his dwelling,
sometimes beneath it, a cesspool and a dead-well, the former intended
to receive the more solid excreta, the latter the soil-water of the
kitchen--the water, in fact, used in the domestic economy of the house.
If the dead-well or pit dug to receive the soiled water of the house be
sufficiently deep, it filters through the soil, and thus requires no
clearing out--if not, it overflows the court or garden, and speedily
renders the place uninhabitable. The cesspool, if deep enough and
properly secured, remains for many years unknown and unperceived, until
filled; it may even be forgotten altogether, and its very existence
remain unknown, until disclosed by accident; but whatever be its age
or condition, so soon as its contents are exposed to the air, it is
found to have continued unaltered; and if spread on the fields, as I
have seen done, renders the vicinity for some time unendurable, thus
proving the sagacity of the Jewish legislator in his instructions to
that people to whom he gave laws and regulations to serve them for all
time to come.[34]
[34] Deuteronomy xxii. 12.
If the adage I have quoted above be true--namely, that we must not
act contrary to nature--there is another of the truth of which we
feel more assured. It is this: whenever man interferes with nature, he
must take the whole matter on himself, and be prepared to meet every
contingency. Nature gave us streams and rivers more or less pure, whose
banks are more or less salubrious. If man pours into these streams and
rivers the refuse of towns and cities, he must be prepared to meet the
result of the experiment. It may be good--it may be bad to him: this
he cannot know beforehand; but reason tells him that the experiment is
likely to prove injurious. It may be less injurious than burying the
excreta in cesspools under his house, or court, or garden;[35] but this
I doubt. In the meantime, how does civilized man protect himself from a
source of disease respecting which there never was a doubt--the natural
humidity of the soil on which he has erected his dwelling, in which he
sleeps and lives? To meet this evil he forms surface drains around his
house and garden and court. Into these collect the humidity natural to
the soil, as well as rains of heaven. These drains, adulterated by no
intermixture with the refuse of house and stables, terminate in the
nearest streams, and serve to maintain these streams and rivers into
which they flow at their natural standard.
[35] The Registrar-General consoles the inhabitants of London on the
relative amount of injury, being in favour of the plan of polluting
the Thames rather than of gradually abolishing cesspools.
Thus, before it was discovered that the best way of dealing with these
difficult questions was to break down the distinction between drain
and sewer (thus poisoning, probably for all time to come, the air of
towns and cities), construct a sewer which soon becomes a cloaca to
receive all, and in open day and above ground throw the contents into
the nearest stream--imitating old Rome, without knowing anything of
Rome’s municipal economy, our forefathers drew a marked and clear
distinction--1st, between drain and sewer; 2nd, between a cesspool
and a dead-well; 3rd, between the excreta of man, which they knew
to be offensive, and that of animals, which all were well aware are
innoxious: the latter they restored to the fields, the former they
disposed of as best they could.
Society, having rejected in this instance the experience of their
forefathers, enters now on a new phasis. Nature, about which they talk
so much, will not suffer them to rest half way. Bad odours pervade
the streets, courts, and houses: rivers can scarcely be approached.
Chemists affirm that that which is thrown into the sea should be
returned to the land. It is this question, in so far as it bears on the
matter discussed in this chapter, I shall now briefly discuss.
There lie before me the “Letters on Chemistry” of an illustrious German
chemist.[36] They contain the expression of the latest scientific
results hitherto attained. Whatever view those who follow us may adopt,
we must in the meantime accept, to a certain extent, of those contained
in these “Letters.” A phenomenon must be accepted as a fact until
refuted by another; and the last experiment, until refuted, expresses
the nearest approach to that truth which, up to the moment, man had
been able to attain. Simple observation tells man many truths. It
shows him that out of grass, herbivora, or grass-eating animals of all
kinds--from the timid hare to the swift and powerful horse--from the
fierce buffalo to the sagacious and irresistible elephant--find the
means for forming muscle and bones, viscera and skin. Out of a similar
food man himself, though no doubt omnivorous, can also derive the means
of support. The rice-eating population of India are not deficient in
energy; whilst it is equally certain, though less surprising, no doubt,
that out of that which once was a living animal, man and the carnivora
derive a considerable part of their subsistence.
[36] “Letters on Chemistry.” By Justus von Liebig. London, 1857.
No experiments can set aside these simple views, which indeed form the
basis of all inquiry; but civilized man, as I have shown, appeals to
the soil mainly for support. He trusts to the cerealia, and to those
exuberant and abundant crops of legumina and of grains required for the
support of herds of animals, which the uncultivated field could never
maintain. Hence arose agriculture, the most useful of all the practical
arts--not yet a science, but likely in time to become one.
Chemists assert--and I see no reason to doubt their experiments--that
the ash of the blood of graminivorous animals is identical with that
of the ash of grain; the incombustible constituents of the blood of
men, and of such animals as consume a mixed food, are the constituents
of the ashes of bread, flesh, and vegetables; the carnivorous animal
contains in its blood the constituents of the ash of flesh.[37] All
these substances ought to be found in grass alone.
[37] Liebig, p. 384.
In these processes it would seem that phosphoric acid plays a most
important, and, as it would seem, an essential part. To this I
shall return: at present I merely consider man’s influence on the
soil or earth he lives on, what he derives from it, and what he
returns to it, and in what form it is and ought to be returned.
If it be true that without trees there would be no underwood, no
corn, and no crops,--for trees attract the fertilizing rain, and
cause the springs perpetually to flow which diffuse prosperity and
comfort,--then assuredly man ought to be most careful in interfering
with nature. It is the remark, I think of the illustrious Humboldt,
that when the white man took possession of certain districts of North
America, vast forests prevailed everywhere. On taking possession,
experience showed that agues prevailed, and that wheat might be grown
successfully. The forests have been now destroyed, and agues have
disappeared; but phthisis pulmonalis prevails, and wheat no longer
grows to maturity. We interfere with the soil as nature made it when
we force it to produce from one acre the natural produce of ten; we
interfere with the processes of nature when we load the air with the
products of thousands of furnaces, manufactories, and the poison
exhaled from poisonous rivers and brooks; and we interfere with nature
when we alter the constitution of those streams and rivers from a
natural to an artificial state, loading them with the refuse of our
artificially-drained fields, &c.
Let us listen to Liebig on a matter to which he has given the utmost
possible attention:--
“Experience in agriculture shows that the production of vegetables on a
given surface increases with the supply of certain matters, originally
part of the soil which had been taken up from it by plants--the excreta
of man and animals. These are nothing more than matters derived from
vegetable food, which in the vital processes of animals, or after
their death, assume again the form under which they originally existed
as parts of the soil. Now we know that the atmosphere contains none
of those substances, and therefore can replace none; and we know
that their removal from a soil destroys its fertility, which may be
restored and increased by a new supply. Is it possible, after so many
decisive investigations into the origin of the elements of animals
and vegetables, the use of the alkalies of lime and the phosphates,
that any doubt can exist as to the principles upon which a rational
agriculture depends? Can the art of agriculture be based upon anything
but the restitution of a disturbed equilibrium? Can it be imagined that
any country, however rich and fertile, with a flourishing commerce,
which for centuries exports its produce in the shape of grain and
cattle, will maintain its fertility if the same commerce does not
restore, in some form of manure, those elements which have been removed
from the soil, and which cannot be replaced by the atmosphere? Must not
the same fate await every such country, which has actually befallen
the once prolific soil of Virginia, now in many parts no longer able
to grow its former staple productions--wheat and tobacco? In the large
towns of England the produce both of English and foreign agriculture
is largely consumed. Elements of the soil indispensable to plants,
do not return to the fields; contrivances resulting from the manners
and customs of the English people, and peculiar to them, render it
difficult, perhaps impossible, to collect the enormous quantity of
the phosphates which are daily, as solid and liquid excreta, carried
into the rivers. These phosphates, although present in the soil in
the smallest quantity, are its most important mineral constituents.
It was observed that many English fields exhausted in that manner,
immediately doubled their produce as if by a miracle when dressed with
bone earth imported from the Continent. But if the export of bones from
Germany is continued to the extent it has now reached, our soil must
be gradually exhausted, and the extent of our loss may be estimated by
considering that one pound of bones contains as much phosphoric acid as
a hundredweight of grain.”
Many practical farmers, I am aware, still doubt the facts and theories
of chemistry as applied to agriculture; with them I am free to admit
that agriculture is not a science as yet, but an experimental art. With
this I have nothing to do directly, my object being to show in this
chapter in how far civilized man modifies and influences the soil on
which he lives. He, the practical farmer, clings to farmyard manure,
which he collects in heaps in his farmyard, or by the roadside, exposed
to every change of weather, to drenching rains, to summer heat, and
winter’s cold; from it run in streams over the roads the liquid parts
of the manure, carrying with them the soluble salts; out of what is
left when it has become rotten he hopes to restore to the field what
it lost during the previous crop, and to a certain extent he succeeds;
on the other hand, the chemist argues that the grand object of modern
agriculture is to substitute for farmyard manure, that universal food
of plants, their elements, obtained from other and cheaper sources
retaining its full efficacy; and this can only be done when we shall
have learned, what as yet we know but imperfectly, how to give to an
artificial mixture of the individual ingredients the mechanical form
and chemical qualities essential to their reception, and to their
nutritive action on the plant; for without this form they cannot
perfectly supply the place of farmyard manure. All our labours must be
devoted to the attainment of this important object.
However this may be, and however it may be explained by the chemists,
it must be admitted that to the accidental discovery of bone manure
England owes many turnip crops, and to the introduction of guano from
Peru and Ichaboe crops of wheat which no other manure as yet known
could have produced. Peruvian guano, the best of all, is the excreta
of a sea bird; these excreta, placed in a clear and perfectly dry
atmosphere, have been exposed for centuries to a tropical sun; no rain
falls on the heaps, trodden down only by the gentle feet of the birds
themselves.
That out of such a product there should arise so excellent a manure
surpasses all previous reasoning derived from mere science.[38] It is
obvious, then, that much still remains to be discovered. Were any proof
of this required, we might refer to the agriculture of China, where,
as has been reported, human excreta alone are used as manure, and with
a success unequalled in any other part of the world. In that singular
land they have discovered much, or using perhaps the discoveries
of preceding races, have turned them to the best account. Their
agriculture is said to be perfect.
[38] The guano of sea-birds when exposed to rain is of no value.
With such a system of manure and such a population one might predicate
a condition of earth, air, and water, incompatible with human life. Now
the very reverse happens, at least, in so far as regards the Chinese
themselves.
No land so teems with a population strong, active, and in robust
health; true, it does not suit the European constitution; fever and
dysentery sweep off the troops and sailors of European nations who
visit the Celestial Empire for the purpose of trade or of plunder.
There is a something unknown in the climate unsuitable to the
European; the condition of the earth, air, and water of China, is fatal
to him. In which of these does the noxious element reside--in all or in
none? This is possible; but man in the meantime must decide by what he
knows and sees. Here is a land teeming with life; on land, as on its
waters, millions live; but that life, as regards man, is confined to
the Chinese race, and is unsuited to the European; as regards the soil,
manured in so strange a manner, it also is Chinese. Is it that we,
generally speaking, spread the material in a liquid and vastly diluted
form over the fields, whilst they manipulate and remove from it all
moisture? There may be something in this, for it is known that organic
compounds, above all, are most susceptible of change by the least
perceivable alterations in their constituents. Agriculture is both a
science and an art.
“The clearing of the primeval forests of America, facilitating the
access of the air to that soil, so rich in vegetable remains, alters
gradually, but altogether, its constitution; after the lapse of a
few years no trace of organic remains can be found in it. The soil
of Germany, in the time of Tacitus, was covered with a dense, almost
impenetrable forest; it must at that period have exactly resembled
the soil of America, and have been rich in humus and vegetable
substances; but all the products of vegetable life in those primeval
forests have completely vanished from our perceptions. The innumerable
millions of molluscous and other animals, whose remains form extensive
geological formations and mountains, have after death passed into
a state of fermentation and putrefaction, and subsequently, by the
continuous action of the atmosphere, all their soft parts have been
transposed into gaseous compounds, and their shells and bones, their
indestructible constituents, alone remain to furnish evidence of the
existence of life continually extinguished and continually reproduced.”
If these facts are to be depended on, they explain much of the
influence which man exercises over the soil, and of its reaction on
himself; the hay ague or fever is the produce of his own hands; when he
leaves _on the surface_ millions of tons of fermentable and putrescible
organic remains, he prepares for himself some at least of the diseases
which are to follow. It is possible that epidemic influence, over which
he neither has nor can have any control, might be greatly modified, and
its evil effects abated by prudent action on his part. Typhus fever,
the scourge of modern Europe, may not originate in any condition of
the soil produced by man, but it sweeps thousands in the prime of
life from the earth when placed in circumstances clearly dependent on
man himself. Ten thousand young men are lodged in a barrack; speedily
hundreds of these are swept off by typhus or consumption of the lungs;
now something causes this, and the cause may rest with man himself.
Pestilence and typhus follow in the train of famine; if they originate
in fermentescible and putrescible substances, all these were present
prior to the famine, and yet were not equal to the production of the
maladies. Next comes famine, and prepares the way for malaria to do
its work. The question, as may be already seen, is not so simple as
chemists supposed it to be. The number of substances occurring in
nature which are truly putrescible is singularly small;[39] but they
are everywhere diffused, and form part of every organized being. To
form an idea of what this amounts to, we have but to reflect on the
life which naturally exists on the earth, and on that which is the
result of man’s social condition. Let but the acre of heath or bog,
even of pasture, which in its natural state supports so little of what
lives, be converted into a garden, a wheat field, a nursery, and see
what an amount of putrescible matter is the result. Let that spot on
which nature has placed a single peasant’s family be converted into a
city, and reflect on the influence man exerts on that soil. It is, I
believe, a fact universally admitted, that all those substances which
destroy the communicability or arrest the propagation of contagions and
miasms, are likewise such as arrest all processes of putrefaction or
fermentation; that under the influence of empyreumatic bodies, such as
pyroligneous acid, which powerfully oppose putrefaction, the diseased
action in malignant suppurating wounds is entirely changed; that in
a number of contagious diseases, especially typhus, ammonia, free or
combined, is found in the exposed air, in the liquid and solid excreta
(in the latter as ammonio-phosphate of magnesia); such being the case,
it seems impossible any longer to entertain a doubt as to the origin
and propagation of many contagious diseases.
[39] Liebig.
“Finally, it is an observation universally made, and which may be
regarded as established, ‘that the origin of epidemic diseases may
often be referred to the putrefaction of great masses of animal and
vegetable matters; that miasmic diseases are found epidemic, where
decomposition of organic substances constantly goes on, in marshy and
damp districts. These diseases also become epidemic, under the same
circumstances, after inundations, and also in places where a large
number of persons are crowded together with imperfect ventilation,
as in ships, in prisons, and in besieged fortresses.’[40] But in no
case may we so securely reckon on the occurrence of epidemic diseases,
as when a marshy surface has been dried up by continued heat, or when
extensive inundations are followed by intense heat.”
[40] Henle, “Untersuchungen,” p. 52; also p. 57.
If we admit these facts we shall be less surprised at the ravages
committed by fever, when, after great battles, the wounded are placed
in the hospitals of large cities, as in Brussels after Waterloo, in
Bilboa, Vienna, &c. Hospital gangrene, the scourge and terror of
the wounded, soon shows itself, and cannot be arrested by any known
surgical means. Much better were it for the wounded that they had been
left on the field of battle. An erroneous opinion prevails, that it is
to the presence of the infusoria that the evil influences are to be
traced; they, on the contrary, whilst alive, act a beneficial part.
The excreta of man whilst putrifying never exhibit the presence of
microscopic animalculæ, whilst we find abundance of them in the same
matters when in a state of decay. “A wise arrangement of nature has
assigned to the infusoria the dead bodies of higher orders of beings
for their nourishment, and has in these animalculæ created a means of
limiting to the shortest possible period the deleterious influence
which the products of dissolution and decay exercise upon the life of
the higher classes of animals. The recent discoveries which have been
made respecting these creatures are so extraordinary and so admirable,
that they deserve to be made universally known.”
It is not to that which lives, but to that which has lived and is now
dead, that we must look for the sources of those terrible fevers which
destroy humanity in so many fine countries. Nor is it necessary that
marshes be present, nor recently inundated lands. Egypt, annually
inundated, is healthy at all times, but it is always cultivated;
the desert also, which is never cultivated, and incapable of any
cultivation, is also healthy. The Arabian desert which skirts the
cultivated spots, converting them into so many oases, is perfectly
healthy; on its soil the traveller may sleep securely; but let him
cross the boundary of the water drain or stream forming the oasis, and
sleep within the limits of that vegetation so delightful to look at,
and violent fever is sure to overtake him on the morrow, so powerfully
in this instance does nature react on man, when altering the soil, he
prepares with his own hand the flowery path which leads him to the
grave.
§ 2. _On the Origin and Action of Humus_.--To Liebig we unquestionably
owe the first philosophical investigation into the history of _humus_.
Innumerable difficulties and prejudices beset the inquiry. It was
he who first showed that all vegetables and all their component
parts, so soon as they cease to live, become liable to two forms
of decomposition,--to putrefaction and to rottenness, that is to
fermentation, and to that slow combustion to which Liebig gave the name
of _eremacausis_, a Greek term, expressing by its original meaning
the fact of slow combustion, to which the illustrious German likened
that process which we commonly express by the term of _pourriture_, or
rottenness. By this last-named process the combustible parts of bodies
in decomposition combine with the oxygen of the air.
The decomposition of the rotting of the woody fibre is attended with
this peculiarity--when in contact with the air, it converts the oxygen
into an equal volume of carbonic acid; so soon as the supply of the
oxygen ceases the rottenness stops. Now remove this carbonic acid, and
add a fresh supply of oxygen, and the rotting commences, and carbonic
acid reappears. The presence of water is essential to this change; the
substances called antiseptic arrest it at once. Now the woody fibre in
this condition of slow combustion or rottenness is precisely what we
call _humus_ or _ulmine_.
The functions of this humus are no doubt remarkable, and in respect of
it some agricultural theories have been formed, resting on no solid
basis. What seems to be tolerably well ascertained is, that in a soil
permeable to air, the oxygen of the atmosphere continues to act on
the humus, giving origin to carbonic acid, and thus furnishing an
atmosphere for the roots of plants growing in that soil. The springing
of the roots themselves seems to depend on the presence of this
atmosphere; hence the labour and pains to pulverize the soil, and to
give access by such processes to the atmospheric air. At this period of
their growth the roots perform all the offices of their leaves which
are ultimately to appear; and soon the plant has two sets of nourishing
organs, the roots and the leaves. In hot summers plants derive their
carbonic acid wholly from the air.
Thus gradually is formed that humus or ulmine to which agriculturists
attach so much importance; that vegetable mould supposed to be the
richest of all soils. But where it forms, a kind of putrefaction
continually goes on; the soil is influenced deeply as a residence for
man. No valetudinarian takes up his abode in the centre of a rich
vegetation in hopes of recovering his health and strength, his elastic
step, and freedom from lassitude and weariness; he, on the contrary,
seeks other regions, where vegetation is scant, humus is not forming,
and the soil is never turned over by human industry.
When vegetation is purely natural, that is when man does not interfere,
the growth of plants does not in the least exhaust the soil. Look at
the meadow and the virgin forest! Now chemistry explains this, or
nearly so. But so soon as man _interferes_, he must be prepared to
undertake the whole labour; if he acts on the earth, the air, and the
waters, they will react on him, and sometimes with fearful effect.
Beyond the processes she exhibits, and which he may read as best he
can, she reveals nothing; all her secrets must be extracted from her
by science, by philosophy, by the slow procedure of experiment and
observation. A traveller from a distant land prepares to cross deserts
of which he has had no previous _experience_; shortly he discovers an
oasis, which to him seems a paradise, and he proposes resting for the
night within its treacherous circle; but the wild Arab, the native
guide, knows better, and explains to him briefly that the desert alone
is healthy, and to rest a night within that seeming paradise is death.
It is the Homeric tale of the syrens reduced to a reality; gorgeous
decorated plants, sweet-smelling flowers, perfumes of Arabia, invite
you to enter that island destined, should you unhappily accept the
invitation, to prove the resting-place of all your labours.
It may seem paradoxical to maintain that by cultivation we at times
render the earth insalubrious, at times comparatively the reverse, but
the fact is so. It was Humboldt, as I have already remarked, who said
that when Europeans first emigrated to America, the soil of certain
northern states was found equal to the growth of wheat, and ague
afflicted the population. With the destruction of the forests, the
agues have disappeared, and wheat can no longer be grown; in the place
of agues men are now afflicted with pulmonary consumption. Whoever has
seen the marshy and boggy land, at times a lake, at others a black
tremulous morass, and compared it with the rich drained Polder, its
neat and compact farm-house, exhaustless meadows, herds of cattle, and
the contented air of its well-to-do proprietor, will at once perceive
that whatever might be the evil, unless it were a something truly
grievous, so delightful a metamorphosis of a spot doomed by nature to
eternal sterility, entailed on man, that evil was fully compensated for
by the results obtained towards man’s happiness. There is, there can
be, or at least there never was, any unmixed good on earth: the whole
is a system of comparison and compensation; of profit or loss; of gains
and drawbacks.
When the English army died off at Walcheren the inhabitants of the
province were perfectly healthy, and could not comprehend the cause of
the calamity. It was the same in the Crimea. Under other arrangements,
those more consonant with common sense and experience, the results
might have been different; still it is certain that masses of young
men of immature years cannot be withdrawn from their native soil and
parents’ hearths without suffering severely the consequence of the
every way unnatural position they are forced to occupy; unnatural
physically and morally. Barrack-rooms are not homes. No varied society
is to be found there; no amusement, no employment for mind and body;
it is man cut off from all human industry and enjoyment; no solace
when ill, no comfort under suffering: that young men with unformed
constitutions should “die off like flies,”[41] need excite no surprise.
[41] The expression of Lord Raglan when he demanded from England
veteran troops, and not lads of immature age, to be sent to the seat
of war.
To return: to modern science, above all to Liebig, the practical
chemist _par excellence_, we owe the discovery of the true office of
_ulmine_ or _humus_ in vegetation; it nourishes the plant before it
is in a position to draw its nourishment from the atmosphere. The
vegetation called antediluvian had this peculiar character, that it
enabled the plant to be greatly independent of roots and soil; its
broad-leaved foliage sought everywhere for food in the carbonic acid
of the atmosphere. Accordingly all the plants were remarkable for the
smallness of their roots, which generally have disappeared, and are now
no longer to be found.
Let me now consider briefly--keeping the same object in view, namely,
its influence on man--what are the sources and results of that amount
of hydrogen or azote which plays so important a part in the economy of
all that lives.
An agricultural farmer at a distance from markets sufficiently
remunerative, has a large field of turnips which he knows not how to
dispose of. Not having cattle or sheep sufficient to consume these
turnips, he addresses himself to drivers of sheep on the way to the
markets, inviting them to turn their sheep into the field, and there
remain until the turnips are consumed. Thus he hopes to restore
to the field the azotized and other principles removed from it by
previous crops, and to prepare the way for fresh and more productive
and profitable crops. It is on the same principle that in many
leases of farms (those called steel-bow) there is an express clause
that the straw shall not quit the farm, but be consumed on it. The
object of this is simply to restore to the soil what forced crops
have removed from it. Man has taken on himself the task of growing
on one acre the natural produce of many; to feed twenty men instead
of one from off the same extent of soil; to live in crowded cities,
drawing their provisions from the surrounding country, producing
nothing of themselves; to feed millions where nature intended but a
few thousands should exist; he has taken the task on himself and must
carry it through, exposed to destruction at every false step, and at
this moment exposed to the accusation by the medical authorities of
England of deliberately rendering his farm-house, his homestead, his
cottage, his mansion, his palace, a pesthouse, the propagator, if not
the absolute generator, of all the wide-spread plagues and pestilences,
from that which desolated Athens in the time of Thucydides; laid
waste the Roman world when Justinian reigned; smote England in the
most unhappy and disgraceful period of past history;[42] and now,
appearing amidst the tents of an obscure Arab tribe, ignorant of
agriculture, living with their flocks and herds on the desert, happily
remote from the influences of boards of health, officers of health,
and registrars-general, once more threatens Europe; he is accused, in
fact, of being the involuntary but certain slaughterer of his little
babes. So says the eloquent Registrar-General of England in one of
his sanitary reports; he belongs, it is true, and this must not be
forgotten, to the theory-loving fraternity,[43] a professor, in fact,
of that conjectural art which heretofore despised statistics, and
which now, by mistaking figures for facts, threatens to convert true
science into a scheme of fictions anything but brilliant. To the
Chadwicks, the Gavins, and a host of others still more potent, but who
always act through the agency of _employées_, we owe the affair of
Luton and of Birmingham, of the disgraceful condition of the Thames and
of innumerable other localities; the deodorizing schemes of Leicester
and Bristol, the intercepting scheme of the Thames, and the network of
officers of health, amounting to 2600, now spread over England for the
benefit of this tax-loving country.
[42] Reign of Charles the Second.
[43] He is, I believe, a physician and an M.D.
If you hope to raise a crop you must replace in the soil certain
elements which previous crops have removed from it. So says Liebig, and
to some extent the experience of mankind supports the view.
The refuse of men and urinals which English speculators recommend you
to throw into the nearest river, or into the sea if you can, or at
least to deluge well with water before throwing it over your fields,
the Belgian farmer places as nearly as may be under ground until
required. Of it he forms a compost, seemingly inoffensive as being
in some measure buried, trapped, and mixed with house refuse, and
other materials. This compost, to which he looks in due time for the
restoration to his well-managed farm of that which abundant crops had
removed from it, he spreads at convenient and suitable times on his
ground, into which it is speedily dug; thus at every step he reverses
the theories of the would-be agriculturists of England, and should
it be said that the measures he adopts are injurious to his health,
destructive to his family, sources of pestilence to the country, we
have the sure and trustworthy statistics of a true statistician[44]
to oppose to the wild theories and bold assertions of the needy
adventurers and hired officials who, clamouring so loudly for place and
distinction, have chosen for the field of their tactics broad England
and her colonies.
[44] Quetelet.