CHAPTER VI.

GREAT PROJECTS OF PHYSICAL CHANGE ACCOMPLISHED OR PROPOSED BY MAN.

Cutting of Isthmuses--Canal of Suez--Maritime Canals in Greece--Canals

to Dead Sea--Canals to Libyan Desert--Maritime Canals in Europe--Cape

Cod Canal--Changes in Caspian--Diversion of the Nile--Diversion of the

Rhine--Improvements in North American Hydrography--Soil below

Rock--Covering Rock with Earth--Desert Valleys--Effects of

Mining--Duponchel's Plans of Improvement--Action of Man on the

Weather--Resistance to Great Natural Forces--Incidental Effects of Human

Action--Nothing Small In Nature

THE EARTH AS MODIFIED BY HUMAN ACTION.

CHAPTER 1.

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 Geographical

Change.--Destructiveness of Man--Human and Brute Action

Compared.--Limits of Human Power.--Importance of Physical Conservation

and Restoration--Uncertainty as to Effects of Human Action.

Natural Advantages of the Territory of the Roman Empire.

The 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 enjoyed 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 any 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 sensuous

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 regularity of commercial transactions. The

ornaments of the barbaric pride of the East, the pearl, the ruby, the

sapphire, and the diamond--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 engravings, which invest

the common onyx and cornelian with a worth surpassing, in cultivated

eyes, the lustre of the most brilliant oriental jewels.

Of these manifold blessings the temperature of the air, the distribution

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 provinces. 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

husbandry--all these were original products of foreign climes,

naturalized in new homes, and gradually ennobled by the art of man,

while centuries of persevering labor were expelling the wild vegetation,

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 intelligent 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 historians 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 most celebrated for the

profusion and variety of their spontaneous and their cultivated

products, and for the wealth and social advancement of their

inhabitants--is either deserted by civilized man and surrendored to

hopeless desolation, or at least greatly reduced 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 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

unproductive 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 thousands of leagues of

shallow sea and fertile lowland into unproductive 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 improvement, 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

ancient Persians, and of the Crusaders and the Tartars in later ages,

could, without an organized commissariat, secure adequate supplies 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 position, 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 completely exhausted of their fertility, or so

diminished in productiveness, as, with the exception of a few favored

oases that have escaped the general ruin, to be no longer capable of

affording sustenance 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 inhabited by tribes too few in

numbers, too poor in superfluous products, and too little advanced in

culture and the social arts, to contribute 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 neither resist

nor guide, and partly also to the direct violence of hostile 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 incidental

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 Caesars, is,

first, the brutal and exhausting despotism which Rome herself exercised

over her conquered kingdoms, and even over her Italian territory; then,

the host of temporal 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 Roman

legions. [Footnote: In the Middle Ages, feudalism, and a nominal

Christianity, whose corruptions 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 despotisms. The burdens in question

fell most heavily on the provinces that had been longest colonized by

the Latin race, and those are the portions of Europe which have suffered

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, indolent

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 cauue of the rapid depopulation observed in the Middle Ages, and

of the prodigious multitude of monasteries which sprang up on every

side. It was doubtless a relief to such miserable 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."--Resume de l'Histoire du Commerce, p. 156.] Man cannot

struggle at once against human oppression 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 wild and luxuriant,

but unprofitable forest growth, or fall into that of a dry and barren

wilderness. The abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, 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

300,000 livres. Theabbey of Saint-Denis was nearly as rich as that of

Saint-Germain-des-Pres.--Lavergne, Economie Rurale de la France, p. 104.

Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruyere 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 indomitable 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, Bowing, 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 fortunate peasants, of those who had

work and bread, and they were then the few."--Petition a la Chambre des

Deputes pour les Villageois l'en empeche ce danser.

Arthur Young, who travelled in France from 1787 to 1789, gives, in the

twenty-first chapter of his Travels, 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

offense, he enumerates 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 despotism. But Young underrates the number of these

oppressive impositions. Moreau de Jonnes, a higher authority, asserts

that in a brief examination he had discovered upwards of three hundred

distinct lights of the feudatory over the person or the property of his

vassal. See Etat Economique et Social de la France, Paris, 1890, 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 unrelenting

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.--Moreau de Jonnes, Etat Economique et Social 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?

Rome imposed on the products of agricultural labor in the rural

districts taxes which the sale of the entire harvest would scarcely

discharge; she drained them of their population by military

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. [Footnote:

Commerce, in common with all gainful occupations except agriculture, was

despised by the Romans, and the exercise of it was forbidden to the

higher 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 gaits in

farm lands.--De Officiis, lib. i.,42.] Hence, large tracts of land were

left uncultivated, 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. [Footnote:

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 depopulated, 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 sustain its producer. Thus

abandoned, these lands often relapsed into the forest state, and, some

centuries later, were again brought under cultivation with renovated

fertility.] Similar 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 offspring,

and of repaying to our great mother the debt which the prodigality and

the thriftlessness of former generations have imposed upon their

successors--thus fulfilling the command of religion and of practical

wisdom, to use this world as not abusing it.

Reaction of Man on Nature.

The revolutions of the seasons, with their alternations of temperature

and of length of day and night, the climates of different zones, and the

general conditions and movements of the atmosphere and the seas, depend

upon causes for the most part cosmical, 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 spontaneously offers.

But it is certain that man has reacted upon organized and inorganic

nature, and thereby modified, if not determined, the material structure

of his earthly home. The measure of that reaction manifestly constitutes

a very important element in the appreciation 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 geographers, and treated with much fulness of detail in regard to

certain limited fields of human effort and to certain specific effects

of human action, it has not, as a whole, so tar 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 intellectual being is affected

by the character of the home which Providence has appointed, and we have

fashioned, for our material habitation. [Footnote:Gods Almagt wenkte van

den troon, En schiep elk volk een land ter woon: Hier vestte Zij een

grondgebied, Dat Zij ona zelven scheppon llet.] It is still too early to

attempt scientific method in discussing this problem, nor is our present

store of the necessary facts by any 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 beneficial in its

influence upon the physical conditions of the earth we inhabit We cannot

always distinguish between the results of man's action 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 unquestionably 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

neutralised 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. [Footnote: Man has not only subverted the natural numerical

relations of wild as well as domestic quadrupeds, fish, birds, reptile,

insect, 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 manifestaion of human

energy, resemble the exercise of a creative power. Even wild animals

have been compelled by him, through 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 granivorous 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 the

inorganic surface of the globe; and the history of the geographical

revolutions thus produced would furnish ample material for a volume.

The modification of organic species by domestication is a branch of

philosophic 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

Campane, for there you shall have abundance of them come up in forme of

a Quince. And as I heare say, one of the channced 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 Melonopopones, as a man

would say, the Quince-pompions or cucumbers"--Pliny, Nat. Hist.,

Holland's translation, book xix, c.5

The word cucumis used in the original of this passage embraces many of

the cucurbitaceae, but the context shows that here means the cucumber.

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 compensations. Soils to

which no nutritious vegetable was indigenous, 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 contributes 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 learnod to conquer, or rather compensate, the

rigors of climate, and have attained to a material wealth and variety of

product that, with all their natural advantages, the granaries of the

ancient world can hardly be said to have enjoyed.

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 observation

or of thought. For labor is life, and Death lives where power lives

unused. [Footnote: Verses addressed by G. C. to Sir Walter

Raleigh.--Haklutt, i., p. 608.]

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. [Footnote: --I troer, at

Synets Sands er lagt i Oiet, Mens dette kun er Redskab. Synet strommer

Fra Sjaelens Dyb, og Oiets fine Nerver Gaae ud fra Hjernens hemmelige

Vaerksted. Henrik Hertz, Kong Rene'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.]

It has been maintained by high authority, that the natural acuteness of

our sensuous faculties cannot 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 thoroughly 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. [Footnote: Skill in marksmanship, whether with

firearms or with other projectile weapons, 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 sportemen 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 Babinet, 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 between 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."--Roger Ascham, Taxophilus, 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. Ave-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 fiat and

wet shell, the archers have a 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 tortoise, 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 calculations--if

such physico-mental operations can property be so called--are made in

the use of other missiles; for no projectile flies in a right line to

its mark. But the exact training of the eye lies at the bottom of them

all, and marksmanship depends almost wholly upon the power of that

organ, whose directions 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 aestimo, I calculate

or estimate. See Wedgwood's Dictionary 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 others where pupils are first taught to

write on large slates or blackboards. The writing is in large

characters, the small letters being an inch or more high. They are

formed with chalk or a slate pencil 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 practised on the blackboard. For a very remarkable account

of the restoration of vision impaired from age, by judicious training,

see Lessons in Life, by Timothy Titcomb, lesson xi. It has been much

doubted whether the artists of the classic ages possessed a more perfect

light than those of modern times, or whether, in executing their minute

mosaics and gem engravings, they need 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

purposes. But though the ancient artists may have had a microscopic

vision, their astronomers cannot 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 observation, at Cairo.]

This exercise of the eye I desire to promote, and, next to moral and

religious doctrine, I know no more important practical lessons in this

earthly life of ours--which, to 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 observation of

terrestrial surface, affords to the eye the best general training that

is accessible to all. The majority of even cultivated men have not the

time and means of acquiring anything beyond a very superficial

acquaintance with any branch of physical knowledge.

Natural science has become so vastly extended, its recorded facts and

its unanswered questions so immensely multiplied, that every strictly

scientific man must be a specialist, and 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; and every traveller, every lover of rural scenery, every

agriculturist, 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 possess, in relation to them,

the means of only qualitative, not quantitative 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 character to those which must have taken place in

more or less remote 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 CLIMATES.

The invention of measures of heat and of atmospheric moisture, pressure,

and precipitation, is extremely recent. Hence, ancient physicists have

left us no thermometric or barometric records, 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 temperatures, extraordinary falls of rain and snow, and unusual

floods or droughts. Our knowledge of the meteorological condition of the

earth, at any period more than two centuries before 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 cultivated 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.

[Footnote: The subject of climatic change, with and without reference to

human action as a cause, has been much discussed by Moreau de Jonnes,

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

Pflansenwelt in der Zeit.]

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,

[Footnote: See two learned articles by Pigorini, in the Nuova Antologia

for January and October, 1870.] containing the implements of the

occupants, remains of their food, and other relics of human life; to the

curious revelations of the Kjokkenmoddinger, 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 man 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. [Footnote: For a very picturesque description of the

Halligs, see Pliny, N.H., Book xvi, c. 1.] These remains are memorials

of races which have left no written records, 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 ascertained to be now altogether extinct; in some others,

both the animals 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

belonging to known dates, or at least to known periods of civilization,

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 together by pins of the same

material, is dug out of a bog, it is inferred 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 arrow heads and knives, in conjunction with

other evidences of human life, conclusive proof as to the antiquity of

the latter. Lyell informs us 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;" [Footnote:

Antiquity of Man, p. 377.] and the North American Indians now

manufacture weapons of stone, and even of glass, chipping them in the

latter case out of the bottoms of thick bottles, with great facility.

[Footnote: "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 hemispherical, 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, without 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 instrument from slipping,

affording no leverage--was remarkable."--Reports of Explorations and

Surveys for Pacific Railroad, vol. ii., 1855, Lieut. Beckwith'S Report,

p. 43. 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.]

We may also be misled by our ignorance of the commercial relations

existing between savage tribes. Extremely rude nations, in spite of

their jealousies and their perpetual wars, sometimes contrive to

exchange the products of provinces very widely separated 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

exported 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 inhabitants 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 conclusions 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 demanded for their advantageous

cultivation. [Footnote: Probably no cultivated vegetable affords so good

an opportunity of studying the law of acclimation of plants as maize or

Indian corn. Maize is grown from the tropics to at least lat. 47 degrees

in Northeastern America, and farther north in Europe. Every two or three

degrees of latitude brings you to a new variety with new climatic

adaptations, and the capacity of the plant to accommodate 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. Meteorological observations, however, do not

show any amelioration of the summer climate in those States within that

period.

It may be said that these cases--and indeed all cases of a supposed

acclimation consisting in physiological changes--are instances of the

origination of new varieties by natural selection, the hardier maize,

tomato, and other vegetables of the North, being the progeny of seeds of

individuals endowed, exceptionally, 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 climate, from a difference in vegetable

growth, is concerned, it is immaterial 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 agricultural 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 cultivation 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 Norwegans

(Allgemeiner Theil), Christinania, 1873, 77 and following pp.] 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, [Footnote: 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 century;

but upon soils where it has been a frequent crop, it is already losing

much of its coloring properties.--Lavergne, Economic Rurale de la

France, pp. 250-201.

I believe there is no doubt that the cultivation of madder in the

vicinity of 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.] or from a change in the

quantity of moisture it habitually contains. After a district of country

has been completely or even partially cleared of its forest growth, and

brought under cultivation, the drying of the soil, under favorable

circumstances, goes on for generations, perhaps for ages. [Footnote: In

many parts of New England there are tracts, many square miles in extent

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 proportion 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 Petraea. 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 ancient 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?

For important observations on supposed changes of climate in our Western

prairie region, from cultivation of the soil and the introduction of

domestic cattle, see Bryant'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 of

other less known causes, diminishing by entering into new inorganic

combinations, and that this element will finally disappear from the

globe.]

In other cases, from injudicioua husbandry, or the diversion or choking

up of natural water-courses, it may become more highly charged with

humidity. An increase or diminution of the moisture of a soil almost

necessarily supposes an elevation or a depression of its winter or its

summer heat, and of its extreme if not of its mean annual temperature,

though such elevation or depression may be so slight as not sensibly to

raise or lower the mercury in a thermometer exposed to the open air. Any

of these causes, more or less humidity, 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. [Footnote: 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 principal 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 gown when the ground

had been twenty years under cultivation. Analogous changes occur slowly

and almost imperceptibly even in spontaneous vegetation. In the peat

mosses of Denmark, Scotch firs and other 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

atmosphere 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 climate. See chapter iii., post.]

Uncertainty of Modern Meteorology.

We are very imperfectly acquainted with the present mean and extreme

temperature, or the precipitation and the evaporation of any extensive

region, even in countries most densely peopled 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

necessary 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;

[Footnote: 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.--Fragments of Science, 3d edition, London, 1871, p. 203.

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.] 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-gauge above the earth is a point of much consequence in making

estimates from its measurements. [Footnote: 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 difference

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 currents of air around the corners of buildings or other

accidents of the surface. This consideration much increases the

importance of great care in the selection of positions for rain-gauges.

But Mr. Bache's conclusions seem not to be accepted by late

experimenters in England. See Quarterly Journal of Science for January,

1871, p. 123.]

The data from which results have been deduced with respect to the

hygrometrical and thermometrical conditions, to the climate in short, of

different countries, 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

authorizes 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 modified by more

numerous series of observations, at different stations within narrow

limits. [Footnote: The nomenclature of meteorology is vague and

sometimes equivocal. Not long since, it was suspected that the observers

reporting to a scientific institution did not agree in their

understanding of the mode of expressing the direction 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

instances, 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 on

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

originated 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-WARDS 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

nineteenth century so write it. In Haklnyt (i., p. 2), EASTERLY is

applied to place, "EASTERLY bounds," and means EASTERN. In a passage in

Drayton, "EASTERLY winds" must mean winds FROM the east; but the same

author, in speaking of nations, uses NORTHERLY for NORTHERN. Lakewell

says: "The sonne cannot goe more SOUTHERNLY from us, nor come more

NORTHERNLY towards us." 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

termination -WARDLY given by this lexicographer is from Donne, where it

means TOWARDS the west.

Shakespeare, 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 in supposed, the others that FROM which it

proceeds. The vocabulary of science has no specific name for one of the

most important phenomena in meteorology--I mean for watery vapor

condensed and rendered visible by cold. The Latins expressed this

condition of water by the word vapor. For INVISIBLE vapor they had no

name, because they did not know that it existed, and Van Helmont was

obliged to invent a word, gas, as a generic name for watery and other

fluids in the invisible state. The moderns have perverted the meaning of

the word vapor, and in science its use is confined to express water in

the gaseous and invisible state. When vapor in rendered visible by

condensation, we call it fog or mist--between which two words there is

no clearly established distinction--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 these words express the form and position of the humid

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 meaning, and to employ a new word, such for example as

hydrogas, to explain the new scientific idea of water in the invisible

state.]

There is one branch of research which is of the utmost importance 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 refer 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 nature, that we cannot safely reason from one

case to the other. In nature, the inclination and exposure of the

ground, the degree of freedom or obstruction of the flow of water over

the surface, the composition and density of the soil, the presence or

absence of perforations by worms and small burrowing quadrupeds--upon

which the permeability of the ground by water and its power of absorbing

and retaining or transmitting moisture depend--its temperature, the

dryness or saturation of the subsoil, 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 infiltration 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 meteorology of a province, it is evident

that our data must be insufficient to warrant positive general

conclusions. In discussing the climatology 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 atmospheric temperature,

pressure, and humidity; or what is the amount of evaporation from water,

ice, or snow, under the varying exposures to which, in actual nature,

they are constantly subjected. If, then, we are so ignorant of all these

climatic phenomena in the best-known regions inhabited by man, it is

evident 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 practicable, 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

vegetable deposit and the action of the winds, until, by a general

compensation of conflicting forces, a condition of equilibrium has been

readied which, without the action of main, 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 occupied by British colonization, the geographical elements

very nearly balanced and compensated each other. At the commencement of

the seventeenth century, the soil, with insignificant exceptions, was

covered with forests; [Footnote: I do not here speak of the vast prairie

region of the Mississippi valley, which cannot properly said ever to

have been a field of British colonization; 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.] 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 succession of herbaceous,

arborescent, and arboreal growths, to their original state. Even a

single generation sufficed to restore them almost to their primitive

luxuriance of forest vegetation. [Footnote: The great fire of Miramichi

in 1825, probably the most extensive and terrific 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 tree of fair dimensions, except where cultivation and

pasturage kept down the forest growth.]

The unbroken 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 husbandry 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 germination of the seeds of broad-leaved trees that had

lain, waiting this kindly influence, perhaps for centuries.

FORMATION OF BOGS.

Two natural causes, destructive in character, were, indeed, in operation

in the primitive American forests, though, in the 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 fallen trees in producing bogs, [Footnote: The

English nomenclature of this geographical feature does not seem well

settled. We have bog, swamp, marsh, morass, moor, fen, turf-moss,

peat-moss, quagmire, all of which, though sometimes more or less

accurately discriminated, are often used interchangeably, or are perhaps

employed, each exclusively, in a particular district. In Sweden, where,

especially in the Lappish provinces, this terr-aqueous formation is very

extensive and important, the names of its different kinds are more

specific in their application. The general designation of all soils

permanently pervaded with water is Karr. The elder Laestadius 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 covered with mosses and

always moist, but very seldom overflowed." He enumerates the following

species of Myra, the character of which will perhaps be sufficiently

understood by the Latin terms into which he translates the vernacular

names, for the benefit of strangers not altogether familiar with the

language and the subject: 1. Homyror, paludes graminosae. 2. Dy, paludes

profundae. 3. Flarkmyror, or proper karr, paludes limosae. 4.

Fjalimyror, paludes uliginosae. 5. Tufmyror, paludes caespitosae. 6.

Rismyror, paludes virgatae. 7. Starrangar, prata irrigata, with their

subdivisions, dry starrungar or risangar, wet starrangar and

frakengropar. 8. Polar, lacunae. 9. Golar, fossae inundatae. The Mossar,

paludes turfosae, which are of great extent, have but two species: 1.

Torfmossar, called also Mossmyror and Snottermyror, and, 2. Bjornmossar.

The accumulations of stagnant or stagnating water originating in bogs

are distinguished into Trask, stagna, and Tjernar or Tjarnar (sing.

Tjern or Tjarn), stagnatiles. Trask are pools fed by bogs, or water

emanating from them, and their bottoms are slimy; Tjernar are small

Trask situated within the limits of Mossar.--L.L. Laestadius, om

Mojligheten af Uppodlingar i Lappmarken, pp. 23, 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, and there are still extensive

tracts of undrained marsh in England. The amount of this formation in

Great Britain is estimated at 6,000,000 acres, with an average depth of

twelve feet, which would yield 21,600,000 tons of air-dried

peat.--Asbjornsen, Tore og Torodrift, Christiania, 1868, p. 6. Peat beds

have sometimes a thickness of ten or twelve yards, or even more. A depth

of ten yards would give 48,000 cubic yards to the acre. The greatest

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 quantity of an acre cannot 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. Asbjornsen 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, N. 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 thoroughly 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.] and of smaller animals, insects, and birds, in destroying

the woods. [Footnote: See Chapter II., post.]

Bogs generally originate in the checking of watercourses by the falling

of timber or of earth and rocks, or by artificial obstructions 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 liable to similar interruption. The fallen trees not completely

covered by water are soon overgrown with mosses; aquatic and semiaquatic

plants propagate themselves, and spread until they more or less

completely fill up the space occupied by the water, and the surface 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

reestablished. [Footnote: "Aquatic plants have a utility in raising the

level of marshy grounds, which renders them very valuable, and may well

be called a geological function. 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

metres, 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."--Boitel, Mise en valeur des Terres pauvres, p. 227.

The bogs of Denmark--the examination of which by Steenstrap 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 grow freely in very wet soils,

has contributed very effectually by its annual deposits to raise the

surface above the water level, and thus to prepare the ground for the

oak.--Vaupell, Bogens Indvandring, pp. 39, 40.

The growth of the peat not unfrequently raises the surface of bogs

considerably above the level of the surrounding country, and they

sometimes burst and overflow lower grounds with a torrent of mud and

water as destructive as a current of lava.]

In countries somewhat further advanced in civilization than those

occupied by the North American Indians, as in mediaeval Ireland, the

formation of bogs may be commenced by the neglect of man to remove, from

the natural channels of superficial drainage, 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, windfalls are more frequent than in those

where the forest is unbroken, because, when openings have been made in

it for agricultural 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 have fallen to the ground, only

one by one, as natural decay brought them down. [Footnote: Careful

examination of the peat mosses in North Sjaelland--which are so 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, Bogens Indvandring i de

Danske Skove, pp. 10,14.] Besides this, the flocks bred by man in the

pastoral 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 animals, 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 compensations, 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 respectively 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 natural drainage, there is little danger of the

degradation of the soil in consequence of the removal of forest or other

vegetable covering, and the natural face of the earth may be considered

as virtually permanent. These conditions are well exemplified in

Ireland, in a great part of England, in extensive districts in Germany

and France, and, fortunately, in an immense proportion of the valley of

the Mississippi and the basin of the great American lakes, as well as in

many parts of the continents of South America 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 Moesia, the comparatively inhospitable homes of barbarous races,

who, in the days of the Caesars, 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 precedent 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

throughout 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 greater 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 hurried 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 compact and

tenacious than that of the plains, and if the sheltering forest has been

destroyed, it is contined 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 pasture and field and vineyard. [Footnote: The character of

geological formation is an element of very great importance 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 declivities of the northern Apennines, as well as of many minor

mountain ridges in Tuscany and other parts or Italy, are covered with

earth which becomes itself almost a fluid when saturated with water.

Hence the erosion of such surfaces 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.]

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 thunderbolt and the tornado,

the most convulsive throes of even the volcano 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 aeons

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 permanence 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 conditions. 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 animal

life. These intentional changes and substitutions constitute, indeed,

great revolutions; but vast as is their magnitude and importance, 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 existences, 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 animals or

of vegetables is secured against being smothered by the encroachments 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 unsparingly persecutes, even to extirpation,

thousands of organic forms which he cannot consume. [Footnote: 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 are capable of valuable uses. The wild cattle of South

America are slaughtered by millions for their hides and hairs; the

buffalo of North America for his skin or his tongue; the elephant, the

walrus, and the narwhal for their tusks; the cetacen, 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 quantities of Indian corn have been used

as domestic fuel, and even for burning 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 improvement

civilization 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 starving 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 beginning to figure in

the English market. We are beginning to learn a better economy in

dealing with the inorganic 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 front silver refineries, and even

from smelting houses of the coarser metals, have not unfrequently

yielded to a second operator a better return than the first had derived

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. 832, 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.

The substitution of expensive machinery for manual labor, even in

agriculture--not to speak of older and more familiar applications--besides

being highly remunerative, has better secured the harvests, and it is

computed that 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.

The cotton growing States in America produce annually nearly three

million tons of cotton seed. This, until very recently, has been thrown

away as a useless incumbrance, but it is now valued at ten or twelve

dollars per ton for the cotton fibre which adheres to it, for the oil

extracted from it, and for the feed which the refuse 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.

There are still, however, cases of enormous waste in many mineral and

mechanical 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 or it as health requires, in others, as in Transylvania,

where it is quarried like stone, the large blocks only are saved, the

fragments, to the amount of millions of hundred weights, being thrown

away.--Bonar, Transylvania, p. 455, 6.

One of the most interesting and important branches of economy at the

present day is the recovery of agents such as ammonia and ethers which

had been utilized in chemical manufactures, and re-employing them

indefinitely afterwards 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 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 further researches in the same

important direction.]

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 proportion, and

attain their perfect measure of strength and beauty, without producing

or requiring any important change in the natural arrangements of

surface, or in each other's spontaneous tendencies, except such mutual

repression of excessive increase as may prevent the extirpation of one

species by the encroachments of another. In short, without man, lower

animal and spontaneous 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, cannot

subsist and rise to the full development of their higher properties,

unless brute and unconscious nature be effectually 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 network 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 mischiefs 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 maintain the cisterns and the canals of

irrigation which a wise antiquity 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 vegetation. He

has ruthlessly warred on all the tribes of animated nature whose spoil

he could convert to his own uses, and he has not 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, [Footnote: It is an interesting and not

hitherto sufficiently noticed fact, that the domestication 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

conquest 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 reclaimed out of our most native flora and

added to his harvests--while, on the contrary, 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

psychology 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 nevertheless seem to cherish

with brutes, and even with vegetable life, sympathies which are much

more feebly felt by civilized men. 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

persecuted as a destroyer of other animals more useful to man, or hunted

for food, is regarded with peculiar respect, one might almost say,

affection. Some of the North American aboriginal 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 "ti Maends Styrke og

tolo Maends Vid," ten men's strength and twelve men's cunning, but they

still pay to him something of the reverence with which ancient

superstition 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 Friis, Lappisk Mythologi,

Christiania, 1871, section 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

redoubtable enemy of their flocks--the lion.

This sympathy helps us to understand how it is that most if not all the

domestic 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 substantially its present artificial character, and that

the properties of nearly all vegetable 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

themsleves from them. See Bremontier, Memoire sur les Dunes, Annales des

Ponts et Chaussees, 1833; premier semestre, 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 yeara ago are no longer respected by the

plunderers of the cornfield, and new terrors must from time to time be

invented for its protection.

Schroeder van der Kolk, in Het Verschil tusschen den Psychischen, Aanleg

van 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 inntances 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.-Ziel en Ligchaam, p. 128. n.

Perhaps the half-wild character ascribed by P. Laestadius and other

Swedish writers to the reindeer of Lapland, may be in some degree due to

the comparative 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.] and the destructive 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

threatening him, at last awakens him to the necessity of preserving what

is left, if not of restoring what has been wantonly wasted. The

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. [Footnote: The difference between the relations of savage

life, and of incipient civilization, 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 developed Indian tribes.

When the tillers of the fields, which must have been cultivated to

sustain the large population that once inhabited those regions,

perished, 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.

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 perhaps impossible to

establish a radical distinction in genere between the two classes of

effects, but there is an essential difference between the motive of

action which calls out the energies of civilized man and the mere

appetite which controls the life of the beast. The action of man,

indeed, is frequently followed by unforeseen 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 instinctively, and, so far as we are able to perceive,

always with a view to single and direct purposes. The backwoodsman and

the beaver alike fell trees; the man that he may convert the forest into

an olive grove that will mature its fruit only for a succeeding

generation, the beaver that he may feed upon the bark of the trees or

use them in the construction of his habitation. The action 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 damages 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

devastations 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 climate 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 qualities 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. [Footnote: Whatever may be thought of the modification

of organic species by natural 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 unforeseen as of purposely

effected improvements accomplished by voluntary selection of breeding

animals.

It is true that nature employs birds and quadrupeds for the

dissemination of vegetable and even of animal species. But when the bird

drops the seed of a fruit it has swallowed, and when the sheep

transports in its fleece the seed-vessel of a burdock from the plain to

the mountain, its action is purely mechanical and unconscious, and does

not differ from that of the wind in producing the same effect.] What is

there, in the influence of brute life, 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 destroy the balance

which nature had established between her organized and her inorganic

creations, and she avenges herself upon the intruder, by letting loose

upon her defaced provinces destructive energies hitherto kept in check

by organic forces destined to be his best auxiliaries, but which he has

unwisely dispersed 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

encumbers the low grounds and chokes the watercourses with its debris,

and--except in countries favored with an equable distribution of rain

through the seasons, and a moderate 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, turfless hills, and of swampy and malarious plains. There are

parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece, and even of Alpine

Europe, where the operation of causes set in action by man has brought

the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the

moon; and though, within that brief space of time which we call "the

historical period," they are known to have been covered with luxuriant

woods, verdant pastures, and fertile meadows, they are now too far

deteriorated to be reclaimable by man, nor can they become again fitted

for human use, except through great geological changes, or other

mysterious influences or agencies of which we have no present knowledge,

and over which we have no prospective control. The earth is fast

becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of

equal human crime and human improvidence, and of like duration with that

through which traces of that crime and that improvidence extend, would

reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of

shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation,

barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species. [Footnote:

---"And it may be remarked that, as the world has passed through these

several stages of strife to produce a Christendom, so by relaxing in the

enterprises it has learnt, does it tend downwards, through inverted

steps, to wildness and the waste again. Let a people give up their

contest with moral evil; disregard the injustice, the ignorance, the

greediness, that may prevail among them, and part more and more with the

Christian element of their civilization; and in declining this battle

with sin, they will inevitably get embroiled with men. Threats of war

and revolution punish their unfaithfulness; and if then, instead of

retracing their steps, they yield again, and are driven before the

storm, the very arts they had created, the structures they had raised,

the usages they had established, are swept away; 'in that very day their

thoughts perish.' The portion they had reclaimed from the young earth's

ruggedness is lost; and failing to stand fast against man, they finally

get embroiled with nature, and are thrust down beneath her ever-living

hand .-Martineau's Sermon, "The Good Soldier of Jesus Christ."]

Physical Improvement.

True, there is a partial reverse to this picture. On narrow theatres,

new forests have been planted; inundations of flowing streams restrained

by heavy walls of masonry and other constructions; torrents compelled to

aid, by depositing the slime with which they are charged, in filling up

lowlands, and raising the level of morasses which their own overflows

had created; ground submerged by the encroachments of the ocean, or

exposed to be covered by its tides, has been rescued from its dominion

by diking; swamps and even lakes have been drained, and their beds

brought within the domain of agricultural industry; drifting coast dunes

have been checked and made productive by plantation; seas and inland

waters have been repeopled with fish, and even the sands of the Sahara

have been fertilized by artesian fountains. These achievements are more

glorious than the proudest triumphs of war, but, thus far, they give but

faint hope that we shall yet make full atonement for our spendthrift

waste of the bounties of nature. [Footnote: The wonderful success which

has attended the measures for subduing torrents and preventing

inundations employed in Southern France since 1863 and described in

Chapter III., post, ought to be here noticed as a splendid and most

encouraging example of well-directed effort in the way of physical

restoration.]

Limits Of Human Power.

It is on the one hand, rash and unphilosophical to attempt to set limits

to the ultimate power of man over inorganic nature, and it is

unprofitable, on the other, to speculate on what may be accomplished by

the discovery of now unknown and unimagined natural forces, or even by

the invention of new arts and new processes. But since we have seen

aerostation, the motive power of elastic vapors, the wonders of modern

telegraphy, the destructive explosiveness of gunpowder, of

nitro-glycerine, and even of a substance so harmless, unresisting, and

inert as cotton, there is little in the way of mechanical achievement

which seems hopelessly impossible, and it is hard to restrain the

imagination from wandering forward a couple of generations to an epoch

when our descendants shall have advanced as far beyond us in physical

conquest, as we have marched beyond the trophies erected by our

grandfathers. There are, nevertheless, in actual practice, limits to the

efficiency of the forces which we are now able to bring into the field,

and we must admit that, for the present, the agencies known to man and

controlled by him are inadequate to the reducing of great Alpine

precipices to such slopes as would enable them to support a vegetable

clothing, or to the covering of large extents of denuded rock with

earth, and planting upon them a forest growth. Yet among the mysteries

which science is hereafter to reveal, there may be still undiscovered

methods of accomplishing even grander wonders than these. Mechanical

philosophers have suggested the possibility of accumulating and

treasuring up for human use some of the greater natural forces, which

the action of the elements puts forth with such astonishing energy.

Could we gather, and bind, and make subservient to our control, the

power which a West Indian hurricane exerts through a small area in one

continuous blast, or the momentum expended by the waves in a tempestuous

winter, upon the breakwater at Cherbourg, [Footnote: In heavy storms,

the force of the waves as they strike against a sea-wall is from one and

a half to two tons to the square foot, and Stevenson, in one instance at

Skerryvore and in another at the Bell Rock lighthouse, found this force

equal to nearly three tons per foot. The seaward front of the breakwater

at Cherbourg exposes a surface about 2,500,000 square feet. In rough

weather the waves beat against this whole face, though at the depth of

twenty-two yards, which is the height of the breakwater, they exert a

very much less violent motive force than at and near the surface of the

sea, because this force diminishes in geometrical, and the distance

below the surface increases in arithmetical, proportion. The shock of

the waves is received several thousand times in the course of twenty

four hours, and hence the sum of impulse which the breakwater resists in

one stormy day amounts to many thousands of millions of tons. The

breakwater is entirely an artificial construction. If then man could

accumulate and control the forces which he is able effectually to

resist, he might be said to be physically speaking, omnipotent.] or the

lifting power of the tide, for a month, at the head of the Bay of Fundy,

or the pressure of a square mile of sea water at the depth of five

thousand fathoms, or a moment of the might of an earthquake or a

volcano, our age--which moves no mountains and casts them into the sea

by faith alone--might hope to scarp the ragged walls of the Alps and

Pyrenees and Mount Taurus, robe them once more in a vegetation as rich

as that of their pristine woods, and turn their wasting torrents into

refreshing streams. [Footnote: Some well-known experiments show that it

is quite possible to accumulate the solar heat by a simple apparatus,

and thus to obtain a temperature which might be economically important

even in the climate of Switzerland. Saussure, by receiving the sun's

rays in a nest of boxes blackened within and covered with glass, raised

a thermometer enclosed in the inner box to the boiling point; and under

the more powerful sun of the Cape of Good Hope, Sir John Hershel cooked

the materials for a family dinner by a similar process, using however,

but at single box, surrounded with dry sand and covered with two

glasses. Why should not so easy a method of economizing fuel be resorted

to in Italy, in Spain, and even in more northerly climate The

unfortunate John Davidson records in his journal that he saved fuel in

Morocco by exposing his teakettle to the sun on the roof of his house,

where the water rose to the temperature of one hundred and forty

degrees, and, of course, needed little fire to bring it to boil. But

this was the direct and simple, not the concentrated or accumulated heat

of the sun.

On the utilizing of the solar heat, simply as heat, see the work of

Mouchot, La Chaleur solaire et ses applications industrielles. Paris,

1860.

The reciprocal convertibility of the natural forces has suggested the

possibility of advantageously converting the heat of the sun into

mechanical power. Ericsson calculates that in all latitudes between the

equator and 45 degrees, a hundred square feet of surface exposed to the

solar rays develop continuously, for nine hours a day on an average,

eight and one fifth horse-power.

I do not know that any attempts have been made to accumulate and store

up, for use at pleasure, force derived from this powerful source.] Could

this old world, which man has overthrown, be rebuilded, could human

cunning rescue its wasted hillsides and its deserted plains from

solitude or mere nomade occupation, from barrenness, from nakedness, and

from insalubrity, and restore the ancient fertility and healthfulness of

the Etruscan sea coast, the Campagna and the Pontine marshes, of

Calabria, of Sicily, of the Peloponnesus and insular and continental

Greece, of Asia Minor, of the slopes of Lebanon and Hermon, of

Palestine, of the Syrian desert, of Mesopotamia and the delta of the

Euphrates, of the Cyrenaica, of Africa proper, Numidia, and Mauritania,

the thronging millions of Europe might still find room on the Eastern

continent, and the main current of emigration be turned towards the

rising instead of the setting sun.

But changes like these must await not only great political and moral

revolutions in the governments and peoples by whom these regions are now

possessed, but, especially, a command of pecuniary and of mechanical

means not at present enjoyed by these nations, and a more advanced and

generally diffused knowledge of the processes by which the amelioration

of soil and climate is possible than now anywhere exists. Until such

circumstances shall conspire to favor the work of geographical

regeneration, the countries I have mentioned, with here and there a

local exception, will continue to sink into yet deeper desolation, and

in the meantime the American continent, Southern Africa, Australia, New

Zealand, and the smaller oceanic islands, will be almost the only

theatres where man is engaged, on a great scale, in transforming the

face of nature.

IMPORTANCE OF PHYSICAL CONSERVATION, AND RESTORATION.

Comparatively short as is the period through which the colonization of

foreign lands by European emigrants extends, great and, it is to be

feared, sometimes irreparable injury has already been done in the

various processes by which man seeks to subjugate the virgin earth; and

many provinces, first trodden by the homo sapiens Europae within the

last two centuries, begin to show signs of that melancholy dilapidation

which is now driving so many of the peasantry of Europe from their

native hearths. It is evidently a matter of great moment, not only to

the population of the states where these symptoms are manifesting

themselves, but to the general interests of humanity, that this decay

should be arrested, and that the future operations of rural husbandry

and of forest industry, in districts yet remaining substantially in

their native condition, should be so conducted as to prevent the

widespread mischiefs which have been elsewhere produced by thoughtless

or wanton destruction of the natural safeguards of the soil. This can be

done only by the diffusion of knowledge on this subject among the

classes that, in earlier days, subdued and tilled ground in which they

had no vested rights, but who, in our time, own their woods, their

pastures, and their ploughlands as a perpetual possession for them and

theirs, and have, therefore, a strong interest in the protection of

their domain against deterioration.

PHYSICAL RESTORATION.

Many circumstances conspire to invest with great present interest the

questions: how far man can permanently modify and ameliorate those

physical conditions of terrestrial surface and climate on which his

material welfare depends; how far he can compensate, arrest, or retard

the deterioration which many of his agricultural and industrial

processes tend to produce; and how far he can restore fertility and

salubrity to soil which his follies or his crimes have made barren or

pestilential. Among these circumstances, the most prominent, perhaps, is

the necessity of providing new homes for a European population which is

increasing more rapidly than its means of subsistence, new physical

comforts for classes of the people that have now become too much

enlightened and have imbibed too much culture to submit to a longer

deprivation of a share in the material enjoyments which the privileged

ranks have hitherto monopolized.