To supply new hives for the emigrant swarms, there are, first, the vast

unoccupied prairies and forests of America, of Australia, and of many

other great oceanic islands, the sparsely inhabited and still

unexhausted soils of Southern and even Central Africa, and, finally, the

impoverished and half-depopulated shores of the Mediterranean, and the

interior of Asia Minor and the farther East. To furnish to those who

shall remain after emigration shall have conveniently reduced the too

dense population of many European states, those means of sensuous and of

intellectual well-being which are styled "artificial wants" when

demanded by the humble and the poor, but are admitted to be

"necessaries" when claimed by the noble and the rich, the soil must be

stimulated to its highest powers of production, and man's utmost

ingenuity and energy must be tasked to renovate a nature drained, by his

improvidence, of fountains which a wise economy would have made

plenteous and perennial sources of beauty, health, and wealth.

In those yet virgin lands which the progress of modern discovery in both

hemispheres has brought and is still bringing to the knowledge and

control of civilized man, not much improvement of great physical

conditions is to be looked for. The proportion of forest is indeed to be

considerably reduced, superfluous waters to be drawn off, and routes of

internal communication to be constructed; but the primitive geographical

and climatic features of these countries ought to be, as far as

possible, retained.

In reclaiming and reoccupying lands laid waste by human improvidence or

malice, and abandoned by man, or occupied only by a nomade or thinly

scattered population, the task of the pioneer settler is of a very

different character. He is to become a co-worker with nature in the

reconstruction of the damaged fabric which the negligence or the

wantonness of former lodgers has rendered untenantable. He must aid her

in reclothing the mountain slopes with forests and vegetable mould,

thereby restoring the fountains which she provided to water them; in

checking the devastating fury of torrents, and bringing back the surface

drainage to its primitive narrow channels; and in drying deadly morasses

by opening the natural sluices which have been choked up, and cutting

new canals for drawing off their stagnant waters. He must thus, on the

one hand, create new reservoirs, and, on the other, remove mischievous

accumulations of moisture, thereby equalizing and regulating the sources

of atmospheric humidity and of flowing water, both which are so

essential to all vegetable growth, and, of course, to human and lower

animal life.

I have remarked that the effects of human action on the forms of the

earth's surface could not always be distinguished from those resulting

from geological causes, and there is also much uncertainty in respect to

the precise influence of the clearing and cultivating of the ground, and

of other rural operations, upon climate. It is disputed whether either

the mean or the extremes of temperature, the periods of the seasons, or

the amount or distribution of precipitation and of evaporation, in any

country whose annals are known, have undergone any change during the

historical period. It is, indeed, as has been already observed,

impossible to doubt that many of the operations of the pioneer settler

TEND to produce great modifications in atmospheric humidity,

temperature, and electricity; but we are at present unable to determine

how far one set of effects is neutralized by another, or compensated by

unknown agencies. This question scientific research is inadequate to

solve, for want of the necessary data; but well conducted observation,

in regions now first brought under the occupation of man, combined with

such historical evidence as still exists, may be expected at no distant

period to throw much light on this subject.

Australia and New Zealand are, perhaps, the countries from which we have

a right to expect the fullest elucidation of these difficult and

disputable problems. Their colonization did not commence until the

physical sciences had become matter of utmost universal attention, and

is, indeed, so recent that the memory of living men embraces the

principal epochs of their history; the peculiarities of their fauna,

their flora, and their geology are such as to have excited for them the

liveliest interest of the votaries of natural science; their mines have

given their people the necessary wealth for procuring the means of

instrumental observation, and the leisure required for the pursuit of

scientific research; and large tracts of virgin forest and natural

meadows are rapidly passing under the control of civilized man. Here,

then, exist greater facilities and stronger motives for the careful

study of the topics in question than have ever been found combined in

any other theatre of European colonization.

In North America, the change from the natural to the artificial

condition of terrestrial surface began about the period when the most

important instruments of meteorological observation were invented. The

first settlers in the territory now constituting the United States and

the British American provinces had other things to do than to tabulate

barometrical and thermometrical readings, but there remain some

interesting physical records from the early days of the colonies,

[Footnote: The Travels of Dr. Dwight, president of Yale College, which

embody the results of his personal observations, and of his inquiries

among the early settlers, in his vacation excursions in the Northern

States of the American Union, though presenting few instrumental

measurements or tabulated results, are of value for the powers of

observation they exhibit, and for the sound common sense with which many

natural phenomena, such for instance as the formation of the river

meadows, called "intervales," in New England, are explained. They

present a true and interesting picture of physical conditions, many of

which have long ceased to exist in the theatre of his researches, and of

which few other records are extant.] and there is still an immense

extent of North American soil where the industry and the folly of man

have as yet produced little appreciable change. Here, too, with the

present increased facilities for scientific observation, the future

effects, direct a contingent, of man's labors, can be measured, and such

precautions taken in those rural processes which we call improvements,

as to mitigate evils, perhaps, in some degree, inseparable from every

attempt to control the action of natural laws.

In order to arrive at safe conclusions, we must first obtain a more

exact knowledge of the topography, and of the present superficial and

climatic condition of countries where the natural surface is as yet more

or less unbroken. This can only be accomplished by accurate surveys, and

by a great mutiplication of the points of meteorological registry,

[Footnote: The general law of tempeture is that it decreases as we

ascend. But in hilly areas the law is reversed in cold, still weather,

the cold air descending, by reason of its greater gravity, into the

valleys. If there be wind enough however, to produce a disturbance and

intermixture of higher and lower atmospheric strata, this exception to

the general law does not take place. These facts have long been familiar

to the common people of Switzerland and of New England, but their

importance has not been sufficiently taken into account in the

discussion of meterological observations. The descent of the cold air

and the rise of the warm effect the relative temperatures of hills and

valleys to a much greater extent that has been usually supposed. A

gentleman well known to me kept a thermometrical record for nearly a

half century in a New England county town, at an elevation of at least

1,5000 feet above the sea. During these years his thermometer never fell

lower that 26 degrees Farrenheit, while at the shire town of the county,

situated in a basin thousand feet lower, and only tem miles distant, as

well as at other points in similar positions, the mercury froze several

times in the same period] already so numerous; and as, moreover,

considerable changes in the proportion of forest and of cultivated land,

or of dry and wholly or partially submerged surface, will often take

place within brief periods, it is highly desirable that the attention of

observers, in whose neighborhood the clearing of the soil, of the

drainage of lakes and swamps, or other great works of rural improvement,

are going on or meditated, should be especially drawn not only to

revolutions in atmospheric tempeture and precipitation, but to the more

easily ascertained and perhaps more important local changes produced by

these operations in the temperature and the hygrometric state of the

superficial strata of the earth, and in its spontaneous vegetable and

animal products.

The rapid extension of railroads, which now everywhere keep pace with,

and sometimes even precede, the occupation of new soil for agricultural

purposes, furnishes great facilities for enlarging our knowledge of the

topography of the territory they traverse, because their cuttings reveal

the composition and general structure of surface, and the inclination

and elevation of their lines constitute known hypsometrical sections,

which give numerous points of departure for the measurement of higher

and lower stations, and of course for determining the relief and

depression of surface, the slope of the beds of watercourses, and many

other not less important questions. [Footnote: Railroad surveys must be

received with great caution where any motive exists for COOKING them.

Capitalists are shy of investments in roads with steep grades, and of

course it is important to make a fair show of facilities in obtaining

funds for new routes. Joint-stock companies have no souls; their

managers, in general, no consciences. Cases can be cited where engineers

and directors of railroads, with long grades above one hundred foot to

the mile, have regularly sworn in their annual reports, for years in

succession, that there were no grades upon their routes exceeding half

that elevation. In fact, every person conversant with the history of

these enterprises knows that in their public statements falsehood is the

rule, truth the exception.

What I am about to remark is not exactly relevant to my subject; but it

is hard to "get the floor" in the world's great debating society, and

when a speaker who has anything to say once finds access to the public

ear, he must make the must of his opportunity, without inquiring too

nicely whether his observations are "in order." I shall harm no honest

man by endeavoring, as I have often done elsewhere, to excite the

attention of thinking and conscientious men to the dangers which

threaten the great moral and even political interests of Christendom,

from the unscrupulousness of the private associations that now control

the monetary affairs, and regulate the transit of persons and property,

in almost every civilized country. More than one American State is

literally governed by unprincipled corporations, which not only defy the

legislative power, but have, too often, corrupted even the

administration of justice. The tremendous power of these associations is

due not merely to pecuniary corruption, but partly to an old legal

superstition--fostered by the decision of the Supreme Court of the

United States in the famous Dartmouth College case--in regard to the

sacredness of corporate prerogatives. There is no good reason why

private rights derived from God and the very constitution of society

should be less respected than privileges granted by legislatures. It

should never be forgotten that no privilege can be a right, and

legislative bodies ought never to make a grant to a corporation, without

express reservation of what many sound jurists now hold to be involved

in the very nature of such grants, the power of revocation. Similar

evils have become almost equally rife in England, and on the Continent;

and I believe the decay of commercial morality, and of the sense of all

higher obligations than those of a pecuniary nature, on both sides of

the Atlantic, is to be ascribed more to the influence of joint-stock

banks and manufacturing and railway companies, to the workings, in

short, of what is called the principle of "associate action," than to

any other one cause of demoralization.

The apophthegm, "the world is governed too much," though unhappily too

truly spoken of many countries--and perhaps, in some aspects, true of

all--has done much mischief whenever it has been too unconditionally

accepted as a political axiom. The popular apprehension of being

over-governed, and, I am afraid, more emphatically the fear of being

over-taxed, has had much to do with the general abandonment of certain

governmental duties by the ruling powers of most modern states. It is

theoretically the duty of government to provide all those public

facilities of intercommunication and commerce, which are essential to

the prosperity of civilized commonwealths, but which individual means

are inadequate to furnish, and for the due administration of which

individual guarantees are insufficient. Hence public roads, canals,

railroads, postal communications, the circulating medium of exchange

whether metallic or representative, armies, navies, being all matters in

which the nation at large has a vastly deeper interest than any private

association can have, ought legitimately to be constructed and provided

only by that which is the visible personification and embodiment of the

nation, namely, its legislative head. No doubt the organization and

management of those insitutions by government are liable, as are all

things human, to great abuses. The multiplication of public

placeholders, which they imply, is a serious evil. But the corruption

thus engendered, foul as it is, does not strike so deep as the

rottenness of private corporations; and official rank, position, and

duty have, in practice, proved better securities for fidelity and

pecuniary integrity in the conduct of the interests in question, than

the suretyships of private corporate agents, whose bondsmen so often

fail or abscond before their principal is detected. Many theoretical

statesmen have thought that voluntary associations for strictly

pecuniary and industrial purposes, and for the construction and control

of public works, might furnish, in democratic countries, a compensation

for the small and doubtful advantages, and at the same time secure an

exemption from the great and certain evils, of aristocratic

institutions. The example of the American States shows that private

corporations--whose rule of action is the interest of the association,

not the conscience of the individual--though composed of

ultra-democratic elements, may become most dangerous enemies to rational

liberty, to the moral interests of the commonwealth, to the purity of

legislation and of judicial action, and to the sacredness of private

rights.]

The geological, hydrographical, and topographical surveys, which almost

every general and even local government of the civilized world is

carrying on, are making yet more important contributions to our stock of

geographical and general physical knowledge, and, within a comparatively

short space, there will be an accumulation of well established constant

and historical facts, from which we can safely reason upon all the

relations of action and reaction between man and external nature.

But we are, even now, breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors

and window frames of our dwelling, for fuel to warm our bodies and to

seethe our pottage, and the world cannot afford to wait till the slow

and sure progress of exact science has taught it a better economy. Many

practical lessons have been learned by the common observation of

unschooled men; and the teachings of simple experience, on topics where

natural philosophy has scarcely yet spoken, are not to be despised.

In these humble pages, which do not in the least aspire to rank among

scientific expositions of the laws of nature, I shall attempt to give

the most important practical conclusions suggested by the history of

man's efforts to replenish the earth and subdue it; and I shall aim to

support those conclusions by such facts and illustrations only as

address themselves to the understanding of every intelligent reader, and

as are to be found recorded in works capable of profitable perusal, or

at least consultation, by persons who have not enjoyed a special

scientific training.

CHAPTER II.

TRANSFER, MODIFICATION, AND EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLE AND OF ANIMAL

SPECIES.

Modern geography takes account of organic life--Geographical importance

of plants--Origin of domestic vegetables-Transfer of vegetable

life--Objects of modern commerce-Foreign plants, how

introduced--Vegetable power of accommodation--Agricultural products of

the United States--Useful American plants grown in Europe--Extirpation

of vegetables--Animal life as a geological and geographical

agency--Origin and transfer of domestic quadrupeds--Extirpation of wild

quadrupeds--Large marine animals relatively unimportant in

geography--Introduction and breeding of fish--Destruction of

fish--Geographical importance of birds--Introduction of

birds--Destruction of birds--Utility and destruction of

reptiles--Utility of insects and worms--Injury to the forest by

insects--Introduction of insects--Destruction of insects--Minute

organisms.

MODERN GEOGRAPHY EMBRACES ORGANIC LIFE.

It was a narrow view of geography which confined that science to

delineation of terrestrial surface and outline, and to description of

the relative position and magnitude of land and water. In its improved

form it embraces not only the globe itself and the atmosphere which

bathes it, but the living things which vegetate or move upon it, the

varied influences they exert upon each other, the reciprocal action and

reaction between them and the earth they inhabit. Even if the end of

geographical studies were only to obtain a knowledge of the external

forms of the mineral and fluid masses which constitute the globe, it

would still be necessary to take into account the element of life; for

every plant, every animal, is a geographical agency, man a destructive,

vegetables, and in some cases even wild beasts, restorative powers. The

rushing waters sweep down earth from the uplands; in the first moment of

repose, vegetation seeks to reestablish itself on the bared surface,

and, by the slow deposit of its decaying products, to raise again the

soil which the torrent lhad lowered. So important an element of

reconstruction in this, that it has been seriously questioned whether,

upon the whole, vegetation does not contribute as much to elevate, as

the waters to depress, the level of the surface.

Whenever man has transported a plant from its native habitat to a new

soil, he has introduced a new geographical force to act upon it, and

this generally at the expense of some indigenous growth which the

foreign vegetable has supplanted. The new and the old plants are rarely

the equivalents of each other, and the substitution of an exotic for a

native tree, shrub, or grass, increases or diminishes the relative

importance of the vegetable element in thegeography of the country to

which it is removed. Further, man sows that he may reap. The products of

agricultural industry are not suffered to rot upon the ground, and thus

raise it by an annual stratum of new mould. They are gathered,

transported to greater or less distances, and after they have served

their uses in human economy, they enter, on the final decomposition of

their elements, into new combinations, and are only in smnall proportion

returned to the soil on which they grew. The roots of the grasses, and

of many other cultivated plants, however, usually remain and decay in

the earth, and contribute to raise its surface, though certainly not in

the same degree as the forest.

The smaller vegetables which have taken the place of trees

unquestionably perform many of the same functions. They radiate heat,

they absorb gases, and exhale uncombined gases and watery vapor, and

consequently act upon the chemical constitution and hygrometrical

condition of the air, their roots penetrate the earth to greater depths

than is commonly supposed, and form an inextricable labyrinth of

filaments which bind the soil together and prevent its erosion by water.

The broad-leaved annuals and perennials, too, shade the ground, and

prevent the evaporation of moisture from its surface by wind and sun.

[Footnote: It is impossible to say how far the abstraction of water from

the earth by broad-leaved field and garden plants--such as maize, the

gourd family, the cabbage, &c.--is compensated by the condensation of

dew, which sometimes pours from them in a stream, by the exhalation of

aqueous vapor from their leaves, which is directly absorbed by the

ground, and by the shelter they afford the soil from sun and wind, thus

preventing evaporation. American farmers often say that after the leaves

of Indian corn are large enough to "shade the ground," there is little

danger that the plants will suffer from drought; but it is probable that

the comparative security of the fields from this evil is in port due to

the fact that, at thin period of growth, the roots penetrate down to a

permanently humid stratum of soil, and draw from it the moisture they

require. Stirring the ground between the rows of maize with a light

harrow or cultivator, in very dry seasons, is often recommended as a

preventive of injury by drought. It would seem, indeed, that loosening

and turning over the surface earth might aggravate the evil by promoting

the evaporation of the little remaining moisture; but the practice is

founded partly on the belief that the hygroscopicity of the soil is

increased by it to such a degree that it gains more by absorption than

it loses by evaporation, and partly on the doctrine that to admit air to

the rootlets, or at least to the earth near them, is to supply directly

elements of vegetable growth.] At a certain stage of growth, grass land

is probably a more energetic evaporator and refrigerator than even the

forest, but this powerful action is exerted, in its full intensity, for

a comparatively short time only, while trees continue such functions,

with unabated vigor, for many months in succession. Upon the whole, it

seems quite certain, that no cultivated ground is as efficient in

tempering climatic extremes, or in conservation of geographical surface

and outline, as is the soil which nature herself has planted.

ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC PLANTS.

One of the most important questions connected with our subject is: how

far we are to regard our cereal grains, our esculent bulbs and roots,

and the multiplied tree fruits of our gardens, as artificially modified

and improved forms of wild, self-propagating vegetation. The narratives

of botanical travellers have often announced the discovery of the

original form and habitat of domesticated plants, and scientific

journals have described the experiments by which the identity of

particular wild and cultivated vegetables has been thought to be

established. It is confidently affirmed that maize and the potato--which

we must suppose to have been first cultivated at a much later period

than the breadstuffs and most other esculent vegetables of Europe and

the East--are found wild and self-propagating in Spanish America, though

in forms not recognizable by the common observer as identical with the

familiar corn and tuber of modern agriculture. It was lately asserted,

upon what seemed very strong evidence, that the Aegilops ovata, a plant

growing wild in Southern France, had been actually converted into common

wheat; but, upon a repetition of the experiments, later observers have

declared that the apparent change was only a case of temporary

hybridation or fecundation by the pollen of true wheat, and that the

grass alleged to be transformed into wheat could not be perpetuated as

such from its own seed.

The very great modifications which cultivated plants are constantly

undergoing under our eyes, and the numerous varieties and races which

spring up among them, certainly countenance the doctrine, that every

domesticated vegetable, however dependent upon human care for growth and

propagation in its present form, may have been really derived, by a long

Succession of changes, from some wild plant not now perhaps much

resembling it. [Footnote: What is the possible limit of such changes, we

do not know, but they may doubtless be carriad vastly beyond what

experience has yet shown to be practicable. Civilized man has

experimented little on wild plants, and especially on forest trees. He

has indeed improved the fruit, and developed new varieties, of the

chestnut, by cultivation, and it is observed that our American

forest-tree nuts and berries, such as the butternut and thewild

mulberry, become larger and better flavored in a single generation by

planting and training. (Bryant, Forest Trees, 1871, pp. 99, 115.) Why

should not the industry and ingenuity which have wrought such wonders in

our horticulture produce analogous results when applied to the

cultivation and amelioration of larger vegetables Might not, for

instance, the ivory nut, the fruit of the Phytelephas macrocarpa,

possibly be so increased in size as to serve nearly all the purposes of

animal ivory now becoming so scarce Might not the various milk-producing

trees become, by cultivation, a really important source of nutriment to

the inhabitants of warm climates In short, there is room to hope

incalculable advantage from the exercise of human skill in the

improvement of yet untamed forms of vegetable life.] But it is, in every

case, a question of evidence.

The only satisfactory proof that a given wild plant is identical with a

given garden or field vegetable, is the test of experiment, the actual

growing of the one from the seed of the other, or the conversion of the

one into the other by transplantation and change of conditions.

[Footnote: The poisonous wild parsnip of New England has been often

asserted to be convertible into the common garden parsnip by

cultivation, or rather to be the same vegetable growing under different

conditions, and it is said to be deprived of its deleterious qualities

simply by an increased luxuriance of growth in rich, tilled earth. Wild

medicinal plants, so important in the rustic materia medica of New

England--such as pennyroyal, for example--are generally much less

aromatic and powerful when cultivated in gardens than when self-sown on

meagre soils. On the other hand, the cinchona, lately introduced from

South America into British India and carefully cultivated there, is

found to be richer in quinine than the American tree.]

It is hardly contended that any of the cereals or other plants important

as human aliment, or as objects of agricultural industry, exist and

propagate themselves uncultivated in the same form and with the same

properties as when sown and reared by human art. [Footnote: Some recent

observations of Wetzatein are worthy of special notice. "The soil of the

Hauran," he remarks, "produces, in its primitive condition, much wild

rye, which is not known as a cultivated plant in Syria, and much wild

barley and oats. These cereals precisely resemble the corresponding

cultivated plants in leaf, ear, size, and height of straw, but their

grains are sensibly flatter and poorer in flour."--Reisebericht uber

Hauran und die Trachenen, p. 40.

Some of the cereals are, to a certain extent, self-propagating in the

soil and climate of California. "VOLUNTEER crops are grown from the seed

which falls out in harvesting. Barley has been known to volunteer five

crops in succession."--Prayer-Frowd, Six Months in California, p. 189.]

In fact, the cases are rare where the identity of a wild with a

domesticated plant is considered by the best authorities as conclusively

established, and we are warranted in affirming of but few of the latter,

as a historically known or experimentally proved fact, that they ever

did exist, or could exist, independently of man. [Footnote: This remark

is much less applicable to fruit trees than to garden vegetables and the

cerealia. The wild orange of Florida, though once considered indigenous,

is now generally thought by botanists to be descended from the European

orange introduced by the early colonists. On the wild apple trees of

Massachusetts see an interesting chapter in Thoreau, Excursions. The fig

and the olive are found growing wild in every country where those trees

are cultivated The wild fig differs from the domesticated in its habits,

its season of fructification, and its insect population, but is, I

believe, not specifically distinguishable from the garden fig, though I

do not know that it is reclaimable by cultivation. The wild olive, which

is so abundant in the Tuscan Maremma, produces good fruit without

further care, when thinned out and freed from the shade of other trees,

and is particularly suited for grafting. See Salvagnoli, Memorie sulle

Maremme, pp. 63-73. The olive is indigenous in Syria and in the Punjaub,

and forms vast forests in the Himalayas at from 1,400 to 2,100 feet

above the level of the sea.--Cleghorn, Memoir on the Timber procured

from the Indus, etc., pp. 8-15. Fraas, Klima und Pfanzenwelt in der

Zeit, pp. 35-38, gives, upon the authority of Link and other botanical

writers, a lift of the native habitats of most cereals and of many

fruits, or at least of localities where those plants are said to be now

found wild; but the data do not appear to rest, in general, upon very

trustworthy evidence. Theoretically, there can be little doubt that all

our cultivated plants are modified forms of spontaneous vegetation,

though the connection is not historically shown, nor are we able to say

that the originals of some domesticated vegetables may not be now

extinct and unrepresented in the existing wild flora. See, on this

subject, Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur, i., pp. 208, 209.

The Adams of modern botany and zoology have been put to hard shifts in

finding names for the multiplied organisms which the Creator has brought

before them, "to see what they would call them;" and naturalists and

philosophers have shown much moral courage in setting at naught the law

of philology in the coinage of uncouth words to express scientific

Ideas. It is much to be wished that some bold neologist would devise

English technical equivalents for the German verwildert, run-wild, and

veredelt, improved by cultivation.]

Transfer of Vegetable Life.

It belongs to vegetable and animal geography, which are almost sciences

of themselves, to point out in detail what man has done to change the

distribution of plants and of animated life and to revolutionize the

aspect of organic nature; but some of the more important facts bearing

on the first branch of this subject may pertinently be introduced here.

Most of the cereal grains, the pulse, the edible roots, the tree fruits,

and other important forms of esculent vegetation grown in Europe and the

United States are believed, and--if the testimony of Pliny and other

ancient naturalists is to be depended upon--many of them are

historically known, to have originated in the temperate climates of

Asia. The agriculture of even so old a country as Egypt has been almost

completely revolutionized by the introduction of foreign plants, within

the historical period. "With the exception of wheat," says Hehn, "the

Nile valley now yields only new products, cotton, rice, sugar, indigo,

sorghum, dates," being all unknown to its most ancient rural husbandry.

[Footnote: On these points see the learned work of Hehn, Kultur.

Pflanzen und Thiere in ihrem Uebergang aus Asien, 1870. On the migration

of plants generally, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, 10th ed., vol.

ii., c.] The wine grape has been thought to be truly indigenous only in

the regions bordering on the eastern end of the Black Sea, where it now,

particularly on the banks of the Rion, the ancient Phasis, propagates

itself spontaneously, and grows with unexampled luxuriance. [Footnote:

The vine-wood planks of the ancient great door of the cathedral at

Ravenna, which measured thirteen feet in length by a foot and a quarter

in width, are traditionally said to have boon brought from the Black

Sea, by way of Constantinople, about the eleventh or twelfth century.

Vines of such dimension are now very rarely found in any other part of

the East, and, though I have taken some pains on the subject, I never

found in Syria or in Turkey a vine stock exceeding six inches in

diameter, bark excluded. Schulz, however, saw at Beitschin, near

Ptolemais, a vine measuring eighteen inches in diameter. Strabo speaks

of vine-stocks in Margiana (Khorasan) of such dimension that two men,

with outstretched arms, could scarcely embrace them. See Strabo, ed.

Casaubon, pp. 78, 516, 826. Statues of vine wood are mentioned by

ancient writers. Very large vine-stems are not common in Italy, but the

vine-wood panels of the door of the chapter-hall of the church of St.

John at Saluzzo are not less than ten inches in width, and I observed

not long since, in a garden at Pie di Mulera, a vine stock with a

circumference of thirty inches.] But some species of the vine seem

native to Europe, and many varieties of grape have been too long known

as common to every part of the United States to admit of the supposition

that they were introduced by European colonists. [Footnote: The Northmen

who--as I think it has been indisputably established by Professor Rafn

of Copenhagen--visited the coast of Massachusetts about theyear 1000,

found grapes growing there in profusion, and the wild vine still

flourishes in great variety and abundance in the southeastern counties

of that State. The townships in the vicinity of the Dighton rock,

supposed by many--with whom, however, I am sorry I cannot agree--to bear

a Scandinavian inscription, abound in wild vines. According to

Laudonniere, Histoire Notable de la Florida, reprint, Paris, 1853, p 5,

the French navigators in 1562 found in that peninsula "wild vines which

climb the trees and produce good grapes."]

OBJECTS OF MODERN COMMERCE.

It is an interesting fact that the commerce--or at least the maritime

carrying trade--and the agricultural and mechanical industry of the

world are, in very large proportion, dependent on vegetable and animal

products little or not at all known to ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish

civilization. In many instances, the chief supply of these articles

comes from countries to which they are probably indigenous, and where

they are still almost exclusively grown; but in most cases, the plants

or animals from which they are derived have been introduced by man into

regions now remarkable for their successful cultivation, and that, too,

in comparatively recent times, or, in other words, within two or three

centuries.

Something of detail on this subject cannot, I think, fail to prove

interesting. Pliny mentions about thirty or forty oils as known to the

ancients, of which only olive, sesame, rape seed and walnut oil--for

except in one or two doubtful passages I find in this author no notice

of linseed oil--appear to have been used in such quantities as to have

had any serious importance in the carrying trade. At the present time,

the new oils, linseed oil, the oil of the whale and other largeo marine

animals, petroleum--of which the total consumption of the world in 1871

is estimated at 6,000,000 barrels, the port of Philadelphia alone

exporting 56,000,000 gallons in that year--palm-oil recently introduced

into commerce, and now imported into England from the coast of Africa at

the rate of forty or fifty thousand tuns a year, these alone undoubtedly

give employment to more shipping than the whole commerce of Italy--with

the exception of wheat--at the most flourishing period of the Roman

empire. [Footnote: A very few years since, the United States had more

than six hundred large ships engaged in the whale fishery, and the

number of American whalers, in spite of the introduction of many now

sources of oils, still amounts to two hundred and fifty.

The city of Rome imported from Sicily, from Africa, and from the Levant,

enormous quantities of grain for gratuitous distribution among the lower

classes of the capital. The pecuniary value of the gems, the spices, the

unguents, the perfumes, the cosmetics and the tissues, which came

principally from the East, was great, but these articles were neither

heavy nor bulky and their transportation required but a small amount of

shipping. The marbles, the obelisks, the statuary and other objects of

art plundered in conquered provinces by Roman generals and governors,

the wild animals, such as elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami,

camelopards and the larger beasts of prey imported for slaughter at the

public games, and the prisoners captured in foreign wars and brought to

Italy for sale as slaves or butchery as gladiators, furnished employment

for much more tonnage than all the legitimate commerce of the empire,

with the possible exception of wheat. Independently of the direct

testimony of Latin authors, the Greek statuary, the Egyptian obelisks,

and the vast quantities of foreign marbles, granite, parphyry, basalt,

and other stones used in sculpture and in architecture, which have been

found in the remains of ancient Rome, show that the Imperial capital

must have employed an immense amount of tonnage in the importation of

heavy articles for which there could have been no return freight, unless

in the way of military transportation. Some of the Egyptian obelisks at

Rome weigh upwards of four hundred tons, and many of the red granite

columns from the same country must have exceeded one hundred tons. Greek

and African marbles were largely used not only for columns,

contablatures, and solid walls, but for casing the exterior and

veneering the interior of public and private buildings. Scaurus

imported, for the scene alone of a temporary theatre designed to stand

scarcely for a month, three hundred and sixty columns, which were

disposed in three tiers, the lower range being forty-two feet in

height--See Pliny, Nat. Hist., Lib. xxxvi. Italy produced very little

for export, and her importations, when not consisting of booty, were

chiefly paid for in coin which was principally either the spoil of war

or the fruit of official extortion.]

England imports annually about 600,000 tons of sugar, 100,000 tons of

jute, and about the same quantity of esparto, six million tons of

cotton, of which the value of $30,000,000 is exported again in the form

of manufactured, goods--including, by a strange industrial revolution, a

large amount of cotton yarn and cotton tissues sent to India and

directly or indirectly paid for by raw cotton to be manufactured in

England--30,000 tons of tobacco, from 100,000 to 350,000 tons of guano,

hundreds of thousands of tons of tea, coffee, cacao, caoutchone,

gutta-percha and numerous other important articles of trade wholly

unknown, as objects of commerce, to the ancient European world; and this

immense importation is balanced by a corresponding amount of

exportation, not consisting, however, by any means, exclusively of

articles new to commerce. [Footnote: Many of these articles would

undoubtedly have been made known to the Greeks and Romans and have

figured in their commerce, but for the slowness and costliness of

ancient navigation, which, in the seas familiar to them, was suspended

for a full third of the year from the inability of their vessels to cope

with winter weather. The present speed and economy of transportation

have wrought and are still working strange commercial and industrial

revolutions. Algeria now supplies Northern Germany with fresh

cauliflowers, and in the early spring the market-gardeners of Naples

find it more profitable to send their first fruits to St. Petersburg

than to furnish them to Florence and Rome.]

FOREIGN PLANTS, HOW INTRODUCED.

Besides the vegetables I have mentioned, we know that many plants of

smaller economical value have been the subjects of international

exchange in very recent times. Busbequius, Austrian ambassador at

Constantinople about the middle of the sixteenth century--whose letters

contain one of the best accounts of Turkish life which have appeared

down to the present day--brought home from the Ottoman capital the lilac

and the tulip. The Belgian Clusius about the same time introduced from

the East the horse chestnut, which has since wandered to America. The

weeping willows of Europe and the United States are said to have sprung

from a slip received from Smyrna by the poet Pope; and planted by him in

an English garden; Drouyn de l'IIuys, in a discourse delivered before

the French Societe d'Acclimatation, in 1860, claims for Rabelais the

introduction of the melon, the artichoke and the Alexandria pink into

France; and the Portuguese declare that the progenitor of all the

European and American oranges was an Oriental tree transplanted to

Lisbon, and still living in the last generation. [Footnote: The name

portogallo, so generally applied to the orange in Italy, seems to favor

this claim. The orange, however, was known in Europe before the

discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and therefore, before the

establishment of direct relations between Portugal and the East.--See

Amari, Storia del Musulmani in Sicilia, vol ii., p. 445.

The date-palms of eastern and southern Spain were certainly introduced

by the Moors. Leo Von Rozmital, who visited Barcelona in 1476, says that

the date-tree grew in great abundance in the environs of that city and

ripened its fruit well. It is now scarcely cultivated further north than

Valencia. It is singular that Ritter in his very full monograph on the

palm does not mention those of Spain.

On the introduction of conifera into England see an interesting article

in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1864.

Muller, Das Buch der Pfianzenrodt, p. 86, asserts that in 1802 the

ancestor of all the mulberries in France, planted in 1500, was still

standing in a garden in the village of Allan-Montelimart.] The present

favorite flowers of the parterres of Europe have been imported from

America, Japan and other remote Oriental countries, within a century and

a half, and, in fine, there are few vegetables of any agricultural

importance, few ornamental trees or decorative plants, which are not now

common to the three civilized continents.

The statistics of vegetable emigration exhibit numerical results quite

surprising to those not familiar with the subject. The lonely island of

St. Helena is described as producing, at the time of its discovery in

the year 1501, about sixty vegetable species, including some three or

four known to grow elsewhere also. [Footnote: It may be considered very

highly probable, if not certain, that the undiscriminating herbalists of

the sixteenth century must have overlooked many plants native to this

island. An English botanist, in an hour's visit to Aden, discovered

several species of plants on rocks always reported, even by scientific

travellers, as absolutely barren. But after all, it appears to be well

established that the original flora of St. Helena was extremely limited,

though now counting hundreds of species.] At the present time its flora

numbers seven hundred and fifty species--a natural result of the

position of the island as the half-way house on the great ocean highway

between Europe and the East. Humboldt and Bonpland found, among the

unquestionably indigenous plants of tropical America, monocotyledons

only, all the dicotyledons of those extensive regions having been

probably introduced after the colonization of the New World by Spain.

The seven hundred new species which have found their way to St. Helena

within three centuries and a half, were certainly not all, or ever in

the largest proportion, designedly planted there by human art, and if we

were well acquainted with vegetable emigration, we should probably be

able to show that man has intentionally transferred fewer plants than he

has accidentally introduced into countries foreign to them. After the

wheat, follow the tares that infest it. The woods that grow among the

cereal grains, the pests of the kitchen garden, are the same in America

as in Europe. [Footnote: Some years ago I made a collection of weeds in

the wheatfields of Upper Egypt, and another in the gardens on the

Bosphorus. Nearly all the plants were identical with those which grow

under the same conditions in New England. I do not remember to have seen

in America the scarlet wild poppy so common in European grainfields. I

have heard, however, that it has lately crossed the Atlantic, and I am

not sorry for it. With our abundant harvests of wheat, we can well

afford to pay now and then a loaf of bread for the cheerful radiance of

this brilliant flower.] The overturning of a wagon, or any of the

thousand accidents which befall the emigrant in his journey across the

Western plains, may scatter upon the ground the seeds he designed for

his garden, and the herbs which fill so important a place in the rustic

materia medica of the Eastern States, spring up along the prairie paths

but just opened by the caravan of the settler. [Footnote: Josselyn, who

wrote about fifty years after the foundation of the first British colony

in New England, says that the settlers at Plymouth had observed more

than twenty English plants springing up spontaneously near their

improvements.

Every country has many plants not now, if ever, made use of by man, and

therefore not designedly propagated by him, but which cluster around his

dwelling, and continue to grow luxuriantly on the ruins of his rural

habitation after he has abandoned it. The site of a cottage, the very

foundation stones of which have been carried off, may often be

recognized, years afterwards, by the rank weeds which cover it, though

no others of the same species are found for miles.

"Mediaeval Catholicism," says Vaupell, "brought us the red

horsehoof--whose reddish-brown flower buds shoot up from the ground when

the snow melts, and are followed by the large leaves--comfrey and

snake-root, which grow only where there were convents and other

dwellings in the Middle Ages."--Bogens Indvandring & de Daneke Skove,

pp. 1, 2. ]

Introduction of Foreign Plants.

"A negro slave of the great Cortez," says Humboldt, "was the first who

sowed wheat in New Spain. He found three grains of it among the rice

which had been brought from Spain as food for the soldiers."

About twenty years ago, a Japanese forage plant, the Lesperadeza striata,

whose seeds had been brought to the United States by some unknown

accident made its appearance in one of the Southern States. It spread

spontaneously in various directions, and in a few years was widely

diffused. It grows upon poor and exhausted soils, where the formation of

a turf or sward by the ordinary grasses would be impossible, and where

consequently no regular pastures or meadows can exist. It makes

excellent fodder for stock, and though its value is contested, it is

nevertheless generally thought a very important addition to the

agricultural resources of the South. [Footnote: Accidents sometimes

limit, as well as promote the propagation of foreign vegetables in

countries new to them. The Lombardy poplar is a deciduous tree, and is

very easily grown from cuttings. In most of the countries into which it

has been introduced the cuttings hare been taken from the male, and as,

consequently, males only have grown from them, the poplar does not

produce seed in those regions. This is a fortunate circumstance, for

otherwise this most worthless and least ornamental of trees would spread

with a rapidity that would make it an annoyance to the agriculturist.]

In most of the Southern countries of Europe, the sheep and horned cattle

winter on the plains, but in the summer are driven, sometimes many days'

journey, to mountain pastures. Their coats and fleeces transport seeds

in both directions. Hence we see Alpine plants in champaign districts,

the plants of the plains on the borders of the glaciers, though in

neither case do these vegetables ripen their seeds and propagate

themselves. This explains the occurrence of tufts of common red clover

with pallid and sickly flowers, on the flanks of the Alps at heights

exceeding seven thousand feet.

The hortus siccus of a botanist may accidentally sow seeds from the foot

of the Himalayas on the plains that skirt the Alps; and it is a fact of

very familiar observation, that exotics, transplanted to foreign

climates suited to their growth, often escape from the flower garden and

naturalize themselves among the spontaneous vegetation of the pastures.

When the cases containing the artistic treasures of Thorvaldsen wore

opened in the court of the museum where they are deposited, the straw

and grass employed in packing them were scattered upon the ground, and

the next season there sprang up from the seeds no less than twenty-five

species of plants belonging to the Roman campagna, some of which were

preserved and cultivated as a new tribute to the memory of the great

Scandinavian sculptor, and at least four are said to have spontaneously

naturalized themselves about Copenhagen. [Footnote: Vaupell, Bogens

Indvandring i de Danske Skove, p. 2.]

The Turkish armies, in their incursions into Europe, brought Eastern

vegetables in their train, and left the seeds of Oriental wall plants to

grow upon the ramparts of Buda and Vienna. [Footnote: I believe it is

certain that the Turks introduced tobacco into Hungary, and probable

that they in some measure compensated, the injury by introducing maize

also, which, as well as tobacco, has been claimed as Hungarian by

patriotic Magyars.]

In the campaign of 1814, the Russian troops brought, in the stuffing of

their saddles and by other accidental means, seeds from the banks of the

Dnieper to the valley of the Rhine, and even introduced the plants of

the steppes into the environs of Paris.

The forage imported for the French army in the war of 1870-1871 has

introduced numerous plants from Northern Africa and other countries into

France, and this vegetable emigration is so extensive and so varied in

character, that it will probably have an important botanical, and even

economical, effect on the flora of that country. [Footnote: In a

communication lately made to the French Academy, M. Vibraye gives

numerous interesting details on this subject, and says the appearance of

the many new plants observed in France in 1871, "results from forage

supplied from abroad, the seeds of which had fallen upon the ground. At

the present time, several Mediterranean plants, chiefly Algerian, having

braved the cold of an exceptionally severe winter, are being largely

propagated, forming extensive meadows, and changing soil that was

formerly arid and produced no vegetable of importance into veritable

oases." See Nature, Aug. 1, 1872, p. 263. We shall see on a following

page that canals are efficient agencies in the unintentional interchange

of organic life, vegetable as well as animal, between regions connected

by such channels.]

The Canada thistle, Erigeron Canadense, which is said to have

accompanied the early French voyagers to Canada from Normandy, is

reported to have been introduced into other parts of Europe two hundred

years ago by a seed which dropped out of the stuffed skin of an American

bird.

VEGETABLE POWER OF ACCOMMODATION.

The vegetables which, so far as we know their history, seem to have been

longest objects of human care, can, by painstaking industry, be made to

grow under a great variety of circumstances, and some of them prosper

nearly equally well when planted and tended on soils of almost any

geological character; but the seeds of most of them vegetate only in

artificially prepared ground, they have little self-sustaining power,

and they soon perish when the nursing hand of man is withdrawn from

them.

The vine genus is very catholic and cosmopolite in its habits, but

particular varieties are extremely fastidious and exclusive in their

requirements as to soil and climate. The stocks of many celebrated

vineyards lose their peculiar qualities by transplantation, and the most

famous wines are capable of production only in certain well-defined and

for the most part narrow districts. The Ionian vine which bears the

little stoneless grape known in commerce as the Zante currant, has

resisted almost all efforts to naturalize it elsewhere, and is scarcely

grown except in two or three of the Ionian islands and in a narrow

territory on the northern shores of the Morea.

The attempts to introduce European varieties of the vine into the United

States have not been successful except in California, [Footnote: In

1869, a vine of a European variety planted in Sta. Barbara county in

1833 measured a foot in diameter four foot above the ground. Its

ramifications covered ten thousand square feet of surface and it

annually produces twelve thousand pounds of grapes. The bunches are

sixteen or eighteen inches long, and weigh six or seven pounds.-Letter

from Commissioner of Land-Office, dated May 13, 1860.] and it may be

stated as a general rule that European forest and ornamental trees are

not suited to the climate of North America, and that, at the same time,

American garden vegetables are less luxuriant, productive and tasteful

in Europe than in the United States.

The saline atmosphere of the sea is specially injurious both to seeds

and to very many young plants, and it is only recently that the

transportation of some very important vegetables across the ocean lines

been made practicable, through the invention of Ward's air-tight glass

cases. By this means large numbers of the trees which produce the

Jesuit's bark were successfully transplanted from America to the British

possessions in the East, where this valuable plant may now be said to

have become fully naturalized. [Footnote: See Cleghorn, Forests and

Gardens of South India, Edinburgh, 1861, and The British Parliamentary

return on the Chinchona Plant, 1866. It has been found that the seeds of

several species of CINCHONA preserve their vitality long enough to be

transported to distant regions. The swiftness of steam navigation render

it possible to transport to foreign countries not only seeds but

delicate living plants which could not have borne a long voyage by

sailing vessels.]

Vegetables, naturalized abroad either by accident or design, sometimes

exhibit a greatly increased luxuriance of growth.

The European cardoon, an esculent thistle, has broken out from the

gardens of the Spanish colonies on the La Plata, acquired a gigantic

stature, and propagated itself, in impenetrable thickets, over hundreds

of leagues of the Pampas; and the Anacharis alsinastrum, a water plant

not much inclined to spread in its native American habitat, has found

its way into English rivers, and extended itself to such a degree as to

form a serious obstruction to the flow of the current, and even to

navigation.

Not only do many wild plants exhibit a remarkable facility of

accommodation, but their seeds usually possess great tenacity of life,

and their germinating power resists very severe trials. Hence, while the

seeds of many cultivated vegetables lose their vitality in two or three

years, and can be transported safely to distant countries only with

great precautions, the weeds that infest those vegetables, though not

cared for by man, continue to accompany him in his migrations, and find

a new home on every soil he colonizes. Nature fights in defence of her

free children, but wars upon them when they have deserted her banners

and tamely submitted to the domination of man. [Footnote: Tempests,

violent enough to destroy all cultivated plants, frequently spare those

of spontaneous growth. I have often seen in Northern Italy, vineyards,

maize fields, mulberry and fruit trees completely stripped of their

foliage by hail, while the forest trees scattered through the meadows,

and the shrubs and brambles which sprang up by the wayslde, passed

through the ordeal with scarcely the loss of a leaflet.]

Indeed, the faculty of spontaneous reproduction and perpetuation

necessarily supposes a greater power of accommodation, within a certain

range, than we find in most domesticated plants, for it would rarely

happen that the seed of a wild plant would fall into ground as nearly

similar, in composition and condition, to that where its parent grew, as

the soils of different fields artificially prepared for growing a

particular vegetable are to each other. Accordingly, though every wild

species affects a habitat of a particular character, it is found that,

if accidentally or designedly sown elsewhere, it will grow under

conditions extremely unlike those of its birthplace. Cooper says: "We

cannot say positively that any plant is uncultivable ANYWHERE until it

has been tried;" and this seems to be even more true of wild than of

domesticated vegetation.

The wild plant is much hardier than the domesticated vegetable, and the

same law prevails in animated brute and even human life. The beasts of

the chase are more capable of endurance and privation and more tenacious

of life, than the domesticated animals which most nearly resemble them.

The savage fights on, after he has received half a dozen mortal wounds,

the least of which would have instantly paralyzed the strength of his

civilized enemy, and, like the wild boar, he has been known to press

forward along the shaft of the spear which was trans-piercing his

vitals, and to deal a deathblow on the soldier who wielded it.

True, domesticated plants can be gradually acclimatized to bear a degree

of heat or of cold, which, in their wild state, they would not have

supported; the trained English racer out-strips the swiftest horse of

the pampas or prairies, perhaps even the less systematically educated

courser of the Arab; the strength of the European, as tested by the

dynamometer, is greater than that of the New Zealander. But all these

are instances of excessive development of particular capacities and

faculties at the expense of general vital power. Expose untamed and

domesticated forms of life, together, to an entire set of physical

conditions equally alien to the former habits of both, so that every

power of resistance and accommodation shall be called into action, and

the wild plant or animal will live, while the domesticated will perish.

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS OF THE UNITED STATES.

According to the census of 1870, the United States had, on the first of

June in that year, in round numbers, 189,000,000 acres of improved land,

the quantity having been increased by 16,000,000 acres within the ten

years next preceding. [Footnote: Ninth Census of the United States,

1872, p. 841. By "improved" land, in the reports on the census of the

United States, is meant "cleared land" used for grazing, grass, or

tillage, or which is now fallow, connected with or belonging to a

farm."--Instructions to Marshals and Assistants, Census of 1870.] Not to

mention less important crops, this land produced, in the year ending on

the day last mentioned, in round numbers, 288,000,000 bushels of wheat,

17,000,000 bushels of rye, 282,000,000 bushels of oats, 6,000,000

bushels of peas and beans, 30,000,000 bushels of barley, orchard fruits

to the value of $47,000,000, 640,000 bushels of cloverseed, 580,000

bushels of other grass seed, 13,000 tons of hemp, 27,000,000 pounds of

flax, and 1,730,000 bushels of flaxseed. These vegetable growths were

familiar to ancient European agriculture, but they were all introduced

into North America after the close of the sixteenth century.

Of the fruits of agricultural industry unknown to the Greeks and Romans,

or too little employed by them to be of any commercial importance, the

United States produced, in the same year, 74,000,000 pounds of rice,

10,000,000 bushels of buckwheat, 3,000,000 bales of cotton, [Footnote:

Cotton, though cultivated in Asia from the remotest antiquity, and known

as a rare and costly product to the Latins and the Greeks, was not used

by them except as an article of luxury, nor did it enter into their

commerce to any considerable extent as a regular object of importation.

The early voyagers found it in common use in the West Indies and in the

provinces first colonized by the Spaniards; but it was introduced into

the territory of the United States by European settlers, and did not

become of any importance until after the Revolution. Cottonseed was sown

in Virginia as early as 1621, but was not cultivated with a view to

profit for more than a century afterwards. Sea-island cotton was first

grown on the coast of Georgia in 1786, the seed having been brought from

the Bahamas, when it had been introduced from Anguilla--BIGELOW, Les

Etats-Unis en 1868, p. 370]. 87,000 hogsheads of cane sugar, 6,600,000

gallons of cane molasses, 16,000,000 gallons of sorghum molasses, all

yielded by vegetables introduced into that country within two hundred

years, and--with the exception of buckwheat, the origin of which is

uncertain, and of cotton--all, directly or indirectly, from the East

Indies; besides, from indigenous plants unknown to ancient agriculture,

761,000,000 bushels of Indian corn, 263,000,000 pounds of tobacco,

143,000,000 bushels of potatoes, 22,000,000 bushels of sweet potatoes,

28,000,000 pounds of maple sugar, and 925,000 gallons of maple molasses.

[Footnote: There is a falling off since 1860 of 11,000,000 pounds in the

quantity of maple sugar and of more than a million gallons of maple

molasses. The high price of cane sugar during and since the late civil

war must have increased the product of maple sugar and molasses beyond

what it otherwise would have been, but the domestic warfare on the woods

has more than compensated this cause of increase.] To all this we are to

add 27,000,000 tons of hay,--produced partly by new, partly by long

known, partly by exotic and partly by native herbs and grasses, the

value of $21,000,000 in garden vegetables chiefly of European or Asiatic

origin, 3,000,000 gallons of wine, and many minor agricultural products.

[Footnote: Raenie, Bochmeria tenacissima, a species of Chinese nettle

producing a fibre which may be spun and woven, and which unites many of

the properties of silk and of linen, has been completely naturalized in

the United States, and results important to the industry of the country

are expected from it.]

The weight of this harvest of a year would be many times the tonnage of

all the shipping of the United States at the close of the year

1870--and, with the exception of the maple sugar, the maple molasses,

and the products of the Western prairie lands and of some small Indian

clearings, it was all grown upon lands wrested from the forest by the

European race within little more than two hundred years. The wants of

Europe have introduced into the colonies of tropical America the sugar

cane, [Footnote: The sugar cane was introduced by the Arabs into Sicily

and Spain as early as the ninth century, and though it is now scarcely

grown in those localities, I am not aware of any reason to doubt that

its cultivation might be revived with advantage. From Spain it was

carried to the West Indies, though different varieties have since been

introduced into those Islands from other sources.] the coffee plant, the

orange and the lemon, all of Oriental origin, have immensely stimulated

the cultivation of the former two in the countries of which they are

natives, and, of course, promoted agricultural operations which must

have affected the geography of those regions to an extent proportionate

to the scale on which they have been pursued.

USEFUL AMERICAN PLANTS GROWN IN EUROPE.

America has partially repaid her debt to the Eastern continent. Maize

and the potato are very valuable additions to the field agriculture of

Europe and the East, and the tomato is no mean gift to the kitchen

gardens of the Old World, though certainly not an adequate return for

the multitude of esculent roots and leguminous plants which the European

colonists carried with them. [Footnote: John Smith mentions, In his

Historie of Virginia, 1624, pease and beans as having been cultivated by

the natives before the arrival of the whites, and there is no doubt, I

believe, that several common cucurbitaceous plants are of American

origin; but most, if not all the varieties of pease, beans, and other

pod fruits now grown in American gardens, are from European and other

foreign seed.

Cartier, A.D. 1535-'6, mentions "vines, great melons, cucumbers, gourds

[courges], pease, beans of various colors, but not like ours," as common

among the Indians of the banks of the St. Lawrence--Bref Recit, etc.,

reprint. Paris, 1863, pp. 13, a; 14, b; 20, b; 31, a.] I wish I could

believe, with some, that America is not alone responsible for the

introduction of the filthy weed, tobacco, the use of which is the most

vulgar and pernicious habit engrafted by the semi-barbarism of modern

civilization upon the less multifarious sensualism of ancient life; but

the alleged occurrence of pipe-like objects in old Sclavonic, and, it

has been said, in Hungarian sepulchres, is hardly sufficient evidence to

convict those races of complicity in this grave offence against the

temperance and the refinement of modern society.

EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLES.

Lamentable as are the evils produced by the too general felling of the

woods in the Old World, I believe it does not appear that any species of

native forest tree has yet been extirpated by man on the Eastern

continent. The roots, stumps, trunks, and foliage found in bogs are

recognized as belonging to still extant species. Except in some few

cases where there is historical evidence that foreign material was

employed, the timber of the oldest European buildings, and even of the

lacustrine habitations of Switzerland, is evidently the product of trees

still common in or near the countries where such architectural remains

are found; nor have the Egyptian catacombs themselves revealed to us the

former existence of any woods not now familiar to us as the growth of

still living trees. [Footnote: Some botanists think that a species of

water lily represented in many Egyptian tombs has become extinct, and

the papyrus, which must have once been abundant in Egypt, is now found

only in a very few localities near the mouth of the Nile. It grows very

well and ripens its seeds in the waters of the Anapus near Syracuse, and

I have seen it in garden ponds at Messina and in Malta. There is no

apparent reason for believing that it could not be easily cultivated in

Egypt, to any extent, if there were any special motive for encouraging

its growth.

Silphium, a famous medicinal plant of Lybia and of Persia, seems to have

disappeared entirely. At any rate there is no proof that it now exists

in either of those regions. The Silphium of Greek and Roman commerce

appears to have come wholly from Cyrene, that from the Asiatic deserts

being generally of less value, or, as Strabo says, perhaps of an

inferior variety. The province near Cyrene which produced it was very

limited, and according to Strabo (ed. Casaubon, p. 837), it was at one

time almost entirely extirpated by the nomade Africans who invaded the

province and rooted out the plant.

The vegetable which produced the Balm of Gilead has not been found in

modern times, although the localities in which it anciently grew have

been carefully explored.] It is, however, said that the yew tree, Taxus

baccata, formerly very common in England, Germany, and--as we are

authorized to infer from Theophrastus--in Greece, has almost wholly

disappeared from the latter country, and seems to be dying out in

Germany. The wood of the yew surpasses that of almost any other European

tree in closeness and fineness of grain, and it is well known for the

elasticity which of old made it so great a favorite with the English

archer. It is much in request among wood carvers and turners, and the

demand for it explains, in part, its increasing scarcity.

It is also asserted that no insect depends upon it for food or shelter,

or aids in its fructification, and birds very rarely feed upon its

berries: these are circumstances of no small importance, because the

tree hence wants means of propagation or diffusion common to so many

other plants. But it is alleged that the reproductive power of the yew

is exhausted, and that it can no longer be readily propagated by the

natural sowing of its seeds, or by artificial methods. If further

investigation and careful experiment should establish this fact, it will

go far to show that a climatic change, of a character unfavorable to the

growth of the yew, has really taken place in Germany, though not yet

proved by instrumental observation, and the most probable cause of such

change would be found in the diminution of the area covered by the

forests. The industry of man is said to have been so successful in the

local extirpation of noxious or useless vegetables in China, that, with

the exception of a few water plants in the rice grounds, it is sometimes

impossible to find a single weed in an extensive district; and the late

eminent agriculturist, Mr. Coke, is reported to have offered in vain a

considerable reward for the detection of a weed in a large wheatfield on

his estate in England. In these cases, however, there is no reason to

suppose that diligent husbandry has done more than to eradicate the

pests of agriculture within a comparatively limited area, and the cockle

and the darnel will probably remain to plague the slovenly cultivator as

long as the cereal grains continue to bless him. [Footnote: Although it

is not known that man has absolutely extirpated any vegetable, the

mysterious diseases which have, for the last twenty years, so

injuriously affected the potato, the vine, the orange, the olive, and

silk husbandry, are ascribed by some to a climatic deterioration

produced by excessive destruction of the woods. As will be seen in the

next chapter, a retardation in the period of spring has been observed in

numerous localities in Southern Europe, as well as in the United States,

and this change has been thought to favor the multiplication of the

obscure parasites which causee the injury to the vegetables mentioned.

Babinet supposes the parasites which attack the grape and the potato to

be animal, not vegetable, and he ascribes their multiplication to

excessive manuring and stimulation of the growth of the plants on which

they live. They are now generally, it not universally, regarded as

vegetable, and if they are so, Babinet's theory would be even more

plausible than on his own supposition.--Etudes et lectures, ii, p. 269.

It is a fact of some interest in agricultural economy, that the oidium,

which is so destructive to the grape, has produced no pecuniary loss to

the proprietors of the vineyards in France. "The price of wine," says

Lavergne, "has quintupled, and as the product of the vintage has not

diminished in the same proportion, the crisis has been, on the whole,

rather advantageous than detrimental to the country."--Economie rurale

de la France, pp. 263, 264.

France produces a large surplus of wines for exportation, and the sales

to foreign consumers are the principal source of profit to French

vinegrowers. In Northern Italy, on the contrary, which exports little

wine, there has been no such increase in the price of wine as to

compensate the great diminution in the yield of the vines, and the loss

of this harvest is severely felt. In Sicily, however, which exports much

wine, prices have risen as rapidly as in France. Waltershausen informs

us that in the years 1838-'42, the red wine of Mount Etna sold at the

rate of one kreuzer and a half, or one cent the bottle, and sometimes

even at but two thirds that price, but that at present it commands five

or six times as much.

The grape disease has operated severely on small cultivators whose

vineyards only furnished a supply for domestic use, but Sicily has

received a compensation in the immense increase which it has occasioned

in both the product and the profits of the sulphur mines. Flour of

sulphur is applied to the vine as a remedy against the disease, and the

operation is repeated from two to three or four--and sometimes even

eight or ten--times in a season. Hence there is a great demand for

sulphur in all the vine-growing countries of Europe, and

Waltershausen estimates the annual consumption of that mineral for this

single purpose at 850,000 centner, or more than forty thousand tons. The

price of sulphur has risen in about the same proportion as that of the

wine.--Waltershausen, Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau, pp. 19, 20.]

All the operations of rural husbandry are destructive to spontaneous

vegetation by the voluntary substitution of domestic for wild plants,

and, as we have seen, the armies of the colonist are attended by troops

of irregular and unrecognized camp-followers, which soon establish and

propagate themselves over the new conquests. These unbidden and hungry

guests--the gipsies of the vegetable world--often have great aptitude

for accommodation and acclimation, and sometimes even crowd out the

native growth to make room for themselves. The botanist Latham informs

us that indigenous flowering plants, once abundant on the North-Western

prairies, have been so nearly extirpated by the inroads of half-wild

vegetables which have come in the train of the Eastern immigrant, that

there is reason to fear that, in a few years, his herbarium will

constitute the only evidence of their former existence. [Footnote:

Report of Commissioner of Agriculture of the United States for 1870.]

There are plants--themselves perhaps sometimes stragglers from their

proper habitat--which are found only in small numbers and in few

localities. These are eagerly sought by the botanist, and some such

species are believed to be on the very verge of extinction, from the

zeal of collectors.

ANIMAL LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL AGENCY.

The quantitative value of animated life, as a geological agency, seems

to be inversely as the volume of the individual organism; for nature

supplies by numbers what is wanting in the bulk of the animal out of

whose remains or structures she forms strata covering whole provinces,

and builds up from the depths of the sea large islands, if not

continents. There are, it is true, near the mouths of the great Siberian

rivers which empty themselves into the Polar Sea, drift islands

composed, in an incredibly large proportion, of the bones and tusks of

elephants, mastodons, and other huge pachyderms, and many extensive

caves in various parts of the world are half filled with the skeletons

of quadrupeds, sometimes lying loose in the earth, sometimes cemented

together into an osseous breccia by a calcareous deposit or other

binding material. These remains of large animals, though found in

comparatively late formations, generally belong to extinct species, and

their modern congeners or representatives do not exist in sufficient

numbers to be of sensible importance in geology or in geography by the

mere mass of their skeletons. [Footnote: Could the bones and other

relics of the domestic quadrupeds destroyed by disease or slaughtered

for human use in civilized countries be collected into large deposits,

as obscure causes have gathered together those of extinct animals, they

would soon form aggregations which might almost be called mountains.

There were in the United States, in 1870, as we shall see hereafter,

nearly one hundred millions of horses, black cattle, sheep, and swine.

There are great numbers of all the same animals in the British American

Provinces and in Mexico, and there are large herds of wild horses on the

plains, and of tamed among the independent Indian tribes of North

America. It would perhaps not be extravagant to suppose that all these

cattle may amount to two thirds as many as those of the United States,

and thus we have in North America a total of 160,000,000 domestic

quadrupeds belonging to species introduced by European colonization,

besides dogs, cats, and other four-footed household pets and pests, also

of foreign origin.

If we allow half a solid foot to the skeleton and other slowly

destructible parts of each animal, the remains of these herds would form

a cubical mass measuring not much short of four hundred and fifty feet

to the side, or a pyramid equal in dimensions to that of Cheops, and as

the average life of these animals does not exceed six or seven years,

the accumulations of their bones, horns, hoofs, and other durable

remains would amount to at least fifteen times as great a volume in a

single century. It is true that the actual mass of solid matter, left by

the decay of dead domestic quadrupeds and permanently added to the crust

of the earth, is not so great as this calculation makes it. The greatest

proportion of the soft parts of domestic animals, and even of the bones,

is soon decomposed, through direct consumption by man and other

carnivora, industrial use, and employment as manure, and enters into new

combinations in which its animal origin is scarcely traceable; there is,

nevertheless, a large annual residuum, which, like decayed vegetable

matter, becomes a part of the superficial mould; and in any event, brute

life immensely changes the form and character of the superficial strata,

if it does not sensibly augment the quantity of the matter composing

them. The remains of man, too, add to the earthy coating that covers the

face of the globe. The human bodies deposited in the catacombs during

the long, long ages of Egyptian history, would perhaps build as large a

pile as one generation of the quadrupeds of the United States. In the

barbarous days of old Moslem warfare, the conquerors erected large

pyramids of human skulls. The soil of cemeteries in the great cities of

Europe has sometimes been raised several feet by the deposit of the dead

during a few generations. In the East, Turks and Christians alike bury

bodies but a cople of feet beneath the sculptures of the ignoble poor,

and of those whose monuments time or accident has removed, are opened

again and again to receive fresh occupants. Hence the ground in Oriental

cemeteries is pervaded with relics of humanity, of not wholly composed

of them; and an examination of the soil of the lower part of the Petit

Champ des Morts, at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the observer

that it consists almost exclusively of the comminuted bones of his

fellow-man.] But the vegetable products found with them, and, in rare

cases, in the stomachs of some of them, are those of yet extant plants;

and besides this evidence, the discovery of works of human art,

deposited in juxtaposition with fossil bones, and evidently at the same

time and by the same agency which buried these latter--not to speak of

human bones found in the same strata--proves that the animals whose

former existence they testify were contemporaneous with man, and

possibly even extirpated by him. [Footnote: The bones of mammoths and

mastodons, in many instances, appear to have been grazed or cut by flint

arrow-heads or other stone weapons, and the bones of animals now extinct

are often wrought into arms and utensils, or split to extract the

marrow. These accounts have often been discredited, because it has been

assumed that the extinction of these animals was more ancient than the

existence of man. Recent discoveries render it certain that this

conclusion has been too hastily adopted.

On page 143 of the Antiquity of Man, Lyell remarks that man "no doubt

played his part in hastening the era of the extincion" of the large

pachyderms and beasts of prey; but, as contemporaneous species of other

animals, which man cannot be supposed to have extirpated, have also

become extinct, he argues that the disappearance of the quadrupeds in

question cannot be ascribed to human action alone.

On this point it may be observed that, as we cannot know what precise

physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct

organism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified

by the action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of

such organisms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no just

idea.] I do not propose to enter upon the thorny question, whether the

existing races of man are genealogically connected with these ancient

types of humanity, and I advert to these facts only for the sake of the

suggestion, that man, in his earliest known stages of existence, was

probably a destructive power upon the earth, though perhaps not so

emphatically as his present representatives. The larger wild animals are

not now numerous enough in any one region to form extensive deposits by

their remains; but they have, nevertheless, a certain geographical

importance. If the myriads of large browsing and grazing quadrupeds

which wander over the plains of Southern Africa--and the slaughter of

which by thousands is the source of a ferocious pleasure and a brutal

triumph to professedly civilized hunters--if the herds of the American

bison, which are numbered by hundreds of thousands, do not produce

visible changes in the forms of terrestrial surface, they have at least

an immense influence on the growth and distribution of vegetable life,

and, of course, indirectly upon all the physical conditions of soil and

climate between which and vegetation a mutual interdependence exists. In

the preceding chapter I referred to the agency of the beaver in the

formation of bogs as producing sensible geographical effects.

I am disposed to think that more bogs in the Northern States owe their

origin to beavers than to accidental obstructions of rivulets by

wind-fallen or naturally decayed trees; for there are few swamps in

those States, at the outlets of which we may not, by careful search,

find the remains of a beaver dam. The beaver sometimes inhabits natural

lakelets and even large rivers like the Upper Mississippi, when the

current is not too rapid, but he prefers to owe his pond to his own

ingenuity and toil. The reservoir once constructed, its inhabitants

rapidly multiply so long as the trees, and the harvests of pond lilies

and other aquatic plants on which this quadruped feeds in winter,

suffice for the supply of the growing population. But the extension of

the water causes the death of the neighboring trees, and the annual

growth of those which could be reached by canals and floated to the pond

soon becomes insufficient for the wants of the community, and the beaver

metropolis now sends out expeditions of discovery and colonization. The

pond gradually fills up, by the operation of the same causes as when it

owes its existence to an accidental obstruction, and when, at last, the

original settlement is converted into a bog by the usual processes of

vegetable life, the remaining inhabitants abandon it and build on some

virgin brooklet a new city of the waters. [Footnote: I find confirmation

of my own observations on this point (published in 1863) in the

North-West Passage by Land of Milton and Cheadle, London, 1865. These

travellers observed "a long chain of marshes formed by the damming up of

a stream which had now ceased to exist," Chap. X. In Chap. XII, they

state that "nearly every stream between the Pembina and the

Athabasca--except the large river McLeod--appeared to have been

destroyed by the agency of the beaver," and they question whether the

vast extent of swampy ground in that region "has not been brought to

this condition by the work of beavers who have thus destroyed, by their

own labor, the streams necessary to their own existence."

But even here nature provides a remedy, for when the process of

"consolidation" referred to in treating of bogs in the first chapter

shall have been completed, and the forest re-established upon the

marshes, the water now diffused through them will be collected in the

lower or more yielding portions, cut new channels for their flow, become

running brooks, and thus restore the ancient aspect of the surface.

The authors add the curious observation that the beavers of the present

day seem to be a degenerate race, as they neither fell huge trees not

construct great dams, while their progenitors cut down trees two feet in

diameter and dammed up rivers a hundred feet in width. The change in the

habits of the beaver is probably due to the diminution of their numbers

since the introduction of fire-arms, and to the tact that their

hydraulic operations are more frequently interrupted by the

encroachments of man. In the valley of the Yellowstone, which has but

lately been much visited by the white man, Hayden saw stumps of trees

thirty inches in diameter which had been cut down by beavers.

--Geological Survey of Wyoming, p. 135.

The American beaver closely resembles his European congener, and I

believe most naturalists now regard them as identical. A difference of

speceies has been inferred from a difference in their modes of life, the

European animal being solitary and not a builder, the American

gregarious and constructive. But late careful researches in Germany have

shown the former existence of numerous beaver dams in that country,

though the animal, having becaome rare to form colonies, has of course

ceased to attempt works which require the co-operation of numerous

individuals.--Schleiden, Fur Baum und Wald Leipzig, 1870, p. 68.

On the question of identity and on all others relating to this

interesting animal, see L.H. Morgan's important monograph, The American

Beaver and his Works, Philadelphia, 1868. Among the many new facts

observed by this investigator is the construction of canals by the

beaver to float trunks and branches of trees to his ponds. These canals

are sometimes 600 to 700 feet long, with a width of two or three feet

and a depth of one to one and a half.]

INFLUENCE OF ANIMAL LIFE ON VEGETATION

The influence of wild quadrupeds upon vegetable life have been little

studied, and not many facts bearing upon it have been recorded, but, so

far as it is known, it appears to be conservative rather than

pernicious. Few wild animals depend for their subsistence on vegetable

products obtainable only by the destruction of the plant, and they seem

to confine their consumption almost exclusively to the annual harvest of

leaf or twig, or at least of parts of the vegetable easily reproduced.

If there are exceptions to this rule, they are in cases where the

numbers of the animal are so proportioned to the abundance of the

vegetable that there is no danger of the extermination of the plant from

the voracity of the quadruped, or of the extinction of the quadruped

from the scarcity of the plant. [Footnote: European foresters speak of

the action of the squirrel as injurious to trees. Doubtless this is

sometimes true in the case of artificial forests, but in woods of

spontaneous growth, ordered and governed by nature, the squirrel does

not attack trees, or at least the injury he may do is too trifling to be

perceptible, but he is a formidable enemy to the plantation. "The

squirrels bite the cones of the pine and consume the seed which might

serve to restock the wood; they do still more mischief by gnawing off,

near the leading shoot, a strip of bark, and thus often completely

girdling the tree. Trees so injured must be felled, as they would never

acquire a vigorous growth. The squirrel is especially destructive to the

pine in Sologne, where he gnaws the bark of trees twenty or twenty-five

years old." But even here, nature sometimes provides a compensation, by

making the appetite of this quadruped serve to prevent an excessive

production of seed cones, which tends to obstruct the due growth of the

leading shoot. "In some of the pineries of Brittany which produce cones

so abundantly as to strangle the development of the leading shoot of the

maritime pine, it has been observed that the pines are most vigorous

where the squirrels are most numerous, a result attributed to the

repression of the cones by this rodent."--Boitel, Mise en valeur des

Terres pauvres, p. 50.

Very interesting observations, on the agency of the squirrel and other

small animals in planting and in destroying nuts and other seeds of

trees, may be found in a paper on the Succession of Forests in Thoreau's

Excursions, pp. 135 et seqq.

I once saw several quarts of beech-nuts taken from the winter quarters

of a family of flying squirrels in a hollow tree. The kernels were

neatly stripped of the shells and carefully stored in a dry cavity.] In

diet and natural wants the bison resembles the ox, the ibex and the

chamois assimilate themselves to the goat and the sheep; but while the

wild animal does not appear to be a destructive agency in the garden of

nature, his domestic congeners are eminently so. [Footnote: Evelyn

thought the depasturing of grass by cattle serviceable to its growth.

"The biting of cattle," he remarks, "gives a gentle loosening to the

roots of the herbage, and makes it to grow fine and sweet, and their

very breath and treading as well as soil, and the comfort of their warm

bodies, is wholesome and marvellously cherishing."--Terra, or

Philosophical Discourses of Earth, p. 86.

In a note upon this passage, Hunter observes: "Nice farmers consider the

lying of a beast upon the ground, for one night only, as a sufficient

tilth for the year. The breath of graminivorous quadrupeds does

certainly enrich the roots of grass; a circumstance worthy of the

attention of the philosophical farmer."--Terra, same page.

The "philosophical farmer" of the present day will not adopt these

opinions without some qualification, and they certainly are not

sustained by American observation.

The Report of the Department of Agriculture for March and April, 1872,

states that the native grasses are disappearing from the prairies of

Texas, especially on the bottom-lands, depasturing of cattle being

destructive to them.] This is partly from the change of habits resulting

from domestication and association with man, partly from the fact that

the number of reclaimed animals is not determined by the natural

relation of demand and spontaneous supply which regulates the

multiplication of wild creatures, but by the convenience of man, who is,

in comparatively few things, amenable to the control of the merely

physical arrangements of nature. When the domesticated animal escapes

from human jurisdiction, as in the case of the ox, the horse, the goat,

and perhaps the ass--which, so far as I know, are the only

well-authenticated instances of the complete emancipation of household

quadrupeds--he becomes again an unresisting subject of nature, and all

his economy is governed by the same laws as that of his fellows which

have never been enslaved by man; but, so long as he obeys a human lord,

he is an auxiliary in the warfare his master is ever waging against all

existences except those which he can tame to a willing servitude.

ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF DOMESTIC QUADRUPEDS.

Civilization is so intimately associated with certain inferior forms of

animal life, if not dependent on them, that cultivated man has never

failed to accompany himself, in all his migrations, with some of these

humble attendants. The ox, the horse, the sheep, and even the

comparatively useless dog and cat, as well as several species of

poultry, are voluntarily transferred by every emigrant colony, and they

soon multiply to numbers far exceeding those of the wild genera most

nearly corresponding to them. [Footnote: The rat and the mouse, though

not voluntarily transported, are passengers by every ship that sails for

a foreign port, and several species of these quadrupeds have,

consequently, much extended their range and increased their numbers in

modern times. From a story of Heliogabalus related by Lampridius, Hist.

Aug. Scriptores, ed. Casaubon, 1690, p. 110, it would seem that mice at

least were not very common in ancient Rome. Among the capricious freaks

of that emperor, it is said that he undertook to investigate the

statistics of the arachnoid population of the capital, and that 10,000

pounds of spiders (or spiders' webs--for aranea is equivocal) were

readily collected; but when he got up a mouse-show, he thought ten

thousand mice a very fair number. Rats are not less numerous in all

great cities; and in Paris, where their skins are used for gloves, and

their flesh, it is whispered, in some very complex and equivocal dishes,

they are caught by legions. I have read of a manufacturer who contracted

to buy of the rat-catchers, at a high price, all the rat-skins they

could furnish before a certain date, and failed, within a week, for want

of capital, when the stock of peltry had run up to 600,000.

Civilization has not contented itself with the introduction of domestic

animals alone. The English sportsman imports foxes from the continent,

and Grimalkin-like turns them loose in order that he may have the

pleasure of chasing them afterwards.]

Of the origin of our domestic animals, we know historically nothing,

because their domestication belongs to the ages which preceded written

annals; but though they cannot all be specifically identified with now

extant wild animals, it is presumable that they have been reclaimed from

an originally wild state. Ancient writers have preserved to us fewer

data respecting the introduction of domestic animals into new countries

than respecting the transplantation of domestic vegetables. Ritter, in

his learned essay on the camel, has shown that this animal was not

employed by the Egyptians until a comparatively late period in their

history; [Footnote: The horse and the ass were equally unknown to

ancient Egypt, and do not appear in the sculptures before the XV. and

XVI. dynasties. But even then, the horse was only known as a draught

animal, and the only representation of a horseman yet found in the

Egyptian tombs is on the blade of a battle axe of uncertain origin and

period.] that he was unknown to the Carthaginians until after the

downfall of their commonwealth; and that his first appearance in Western

Africa is more recent still. The Bactrian camel was certainly brought

from Asia Minor to the Northern shores of the Black Sea, by the Goths,

in the third or fourth century, and the buffalo first appeared in Italy

about A.D. 600, though it is unknown whence or by whom he was

introduced. [Footnote: Erdkunde, viii., Asien, 1ste Abtheuung, pp.

660,758. Hehn, Kuttonpflanzen, p. 845.] The Arabian single-humped camel,

or dromedary, has been carried to the Canary Islands, partially

introduced into Australia, Greece, Spain, and even Tuscany, experimented

upon to little purpose in Venezuela, and finally imported by the

American Government into Texas and New Mexico, where it finds the

climate and the vegetable products best suited to its wants, and

promises to become a very useful agent in the promotion of the special

civilization for which those regions are adapted.

Quadrupeds, both domestic and wild, bear the privations and discomforts

of long voyages better than would be supposed. The elephant, the

giraffe, the rhinoceros, and even the hippopotamus, do not seem to

suffer much at sea. Some of the camels imported by the U.S. government

into Texas from the Crimea and Northern Africa were a whole year on

shipboard. On the other hand, George Sand, in Un Hiver au Midi, gives an

amusing description of the sea-sickness of swine in the short passage

from the Baleares to Barcelona. America had no domestic quadruped but a

species of dog, the lama tribe, and, to a certain extent, the bison or

buffalo. [Footnote: See Chapter III., post; also Humboldt, Ansichten der

Natur, i., p. 71. From the anatomical character of the bones of the

urus, or auerochs, found among the relics of the lacustrine population

of ancient Switzerland, and from other circumstances, it is inferred

that this animal had been domesticated by that people; and it is stated,

I know not upon what authority, in Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia, that it

had been tamed by the Veneti also. See Lyell, Antiquity of Man, pp. 24,

25, and the last-named work, p. 480. This is a fact of much interest,

because it is one of the very few HISTORICALLY known instances of the

extinction of a domestic quadruped, and the extreme improbability of

such an event gives some countenance to the theory of the identity of

the domestic ox with, and its descent from, the urus.]Of course, it owes

the horse, the ass, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and the swine, as does

also Australia, to European colonization. Modern Europe has, thus far,

not accomplished much in the way of importation of new animals, though

some interesting essays have been made. The reindeer was successfully

introduced into Iceland about a century ago, while similar attempts

failed, about the same time, in Scotland. The Cashmere or Thibet goat

was brought to France a generation since, and succeeds well. The same or

an allied species and the Asiatic buffalo were carried to South Carolina

about the year 1850, and the former, at least, is thought likely to

prove of permanent value in the United States. [Footnote: The goat

introduced into South Carolina was brought from the district of Angora,

in Asia Minor, which has long been celebrated for flocks of this

valuable animal. It is calculated that more than a million of these

goats are raised in that district, and it is commonly believed that the

Angora goat and its wool degenerate when transported. Probably this is

only an invention of the shepherds to prevent rivals from attempting to

interfere with so profitable a monopoly. But if the popular prejudice

has any foundation, the degeneracy is doubtless to be attributed to

ignorance of the special treatment which long experience has taught the

Angora shepherds, and the consequent neglect of such precautions as are

necessary to the proper care of the animal. Throughout nearly the whole

territory of the United States the success of the Angora goat is

perfect, and it would undoubtedly thrive equally well in Italy, though

it is very doubtful whether in either country the value of its fleece

would compensate the damage it would do to the woods.] The yak, or

Tartary ox, seems to thrive in France, and it is hoped that success will

attend the present efforts to introduce the South American alpaca into

Europe. [Footnote: The reproductive powers of animals, as well as of

plants, seem to be sometimes stimulated in an extraordinary way by

transfer to a foreign clime. The common warren rabbit introduced by the

early colonists into the island of Madeira multiplied to such a degree

as to threaten the extirpation of vegetation, and in Australia the same

quadruped has become so numerous as to be a very serious evil. The

colonists are obliged to employ professional rabbit-hunters, and one

planter has enclosed his grounds by four miles of solid wall, at an

expense of $6,000, to protect his crops against those ravagers.--Revue

des Eaux et Forets, 1870, p. 38.]

According to the census of the United States for 1870, [Footnote: In the

enumeration of farm stock, "sucking pigs, spring lambs, and calves," are

omitted. I believe they are included in the numbers reported by the

census of 1860. Horses and horned cattle in towns and cities were

excluded from both enumerations, the law providing for returns on these

points from rural districts only. On the whole, there is a diminution in

the number of all farm stock, except sheep, since 1860. This is ascribed

by the Report to the destruction of domestic quadrupeds during the civil

war, but this hardly explains the reduction in the number of swine from

39,000,000 in 1800 to 25,000,000 in 1870.] the total number of horses in

all the States of the American Union, was, in round numbers, 7,100,000;

of asses and mules, 1,100,000; of the ox tribe, 25,000,000; of sheep,

28,000,000; and of swine, 25,000,000. The only indigenous North American

quadruped sufficiently gregarious in habits, and sufficiently multiplied

in numbers, to form really large herds, is the bison, or, as he is

commonly called in America, the buffalo; and this animal is confined to

the prairie region of the Mississippi basin, a small part of British

America, and Northern Mexico. The engineers sent out to survey railroad

routes to the Pacific estimated the number of a single herd of bisons

seen within the last fifteen years on the great plains near the Upper

Missouri, at not less than 200,000, and yet the range occupied by this

animal is now very much smaller in area than it was when the whites

first established themselves on the prairies. [Footnote: "About five

miles from camp we ascended to the top of a high hill, and for a great

distance ahead every square mile seemed to have a herd of buffalo upon

it. Their number was variously estimated by the members of the party; by

some as high as half a million. I do not think it any exaggeration to

set it down at 200,000." Steven's Narrative and Final Report. Reports of

Explorations and Surveys for Railroad to Pacific, vol xii, book i.,

1860.

The next day the party fell in with a "buffalo trail," where at least

100,000 were thought to have crossed a slough.

As late as 1868, Sheridan's party estimated the number of bisons seen by

them in a single day at 200,000.--Sheridan's Troopers on the Border,

1868, p. 41.] But it must be remarked that the American buffalo is a

migratory animal, and that, at the season of his annual journeys, the

whole stock of a vast extent of pasture-ground is collected into a

single army, which is seen at or very near any one point only for a few

days during the entire season. Hence there is risk of great error in

estimating the numbers of the bison in a given district from the

magnitude of the herds seen at or about the same time at a single place

of observation; and, upon the whole, it is neither proved nor probable

that the bison was ever, at any one time, as numerous in North America

as the domestic bovine species is at present. The elk, the moose, the

musk ox, the caribou, and the smaller quadrupeds popularly embraced

under the general name of deer, though sufficient for the wants of a

sparse savage population, were never numerically very abundant, and the

carnivora which fed upon them were still less so. It is almost needless

to add that the Rocky Mountain sheep and goat must always have been very

rare.

Summing up the whole, then, it is evident that the wild quadrupeds of

North America, even when most numerous, were few compared with their

domestic successors, that they required a much less supply of vegetable

food, and consequently were far less important as geographical elements

than the many millions of hoofed and horned cattle now fed by civilized

man on the same continent.

EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS.

Although man never fails greatly to diminish, and is perhaps destined

ultimately to exterminate, such of the larger wild quadrupeds as he

cannot profitably domesticate, yet their numbers often fluctuate, and

oven after they seem almost extinct, they sometimes suddenly increase,

without any intentional steps to promote such a result on his part.

During the wars which followed the French Revolution, the wolf

multiplied in many parts of Europe, partly because the hunters were

withdrawn from the woods to chase a nobler game, and partly because the

bodies of slain men and horses supplied this voracious quadraped with

more abundant food. [Footnote: During the late civil war in America,

deer and other animals of the chase multiplied rapidly in the regions of

the Southern States which were partly depopulated and deprived of their

sportsmen by the military operations of the contest, and the bear is

said to have reappeared in districts where he had not been seen in the

memory of living man.] The same animal became again more numerous in

Poland after the general disarming of the rural population by the

Russian Government. On the other hand, when the hunters pursue the wolf,

the graminivorous wild quadrupeds increase, and thus in turn promote the

multiplication of their great four-footed destroyer by augmenting the

supply of his nourishment. So long as the fur of the beaver was

extensively employed as a material for hats, it bore a very high price,

and the chase of this quadruped was so keen that naturalists feared its

speedy extinction. When a Parisian manufacturer invented the silk hat,

which soon came into almost universal use, the demand for beavers' fur

fell off, and the animal--whose habits are an important agency in the

formation of bogs and other modifications of forest nature--immediately

began to increase, reappeared in haunts which he had long abandoned, and

can no longer be regarded as rare enough to be in immediate danger of

extirpation. Thus the convenience or the caprice of Parisian fashion has

unconsciously exercised an influence which may sensibly affect the

physical geography of a distant continent.

Since the invention of gunpowder, gome quadrupeds have completely

disappeared from many European and Asiatic countries where they were

formerly numerous. The last wolf was killed in Great Britain two hundred

years ago, and the bear was extirpated from that island still earlier.

The lion is believed to have inhabited Asia Minor and Syria, and

probably Greece and Sicily also, long after the commencement of the

historical period, and he is even said to have been not yet extinct in

the first-named two of these countries at the time of the first Crusade.

[Footnote: In maintaining the recent existence of the lion in the

countries named in the text, naturalists have, perhaps, laid. too much

weight on the frequent occurrence of representations of this animal in

sculptures apparently of a historical character. It will not do to

argue, twenty centuries hence, that the lion and the unicorn were common

in Great Britain in Queen Victoria's time because they are often seen

"fighting for the crown" in the carvings and paintings of that period.

Many paleontolgists, however, identify the great cat-like animal, whose

skeletons are frequently found in British bone-caves, with the lion of

our times.

The leopard (panthera), though already growing scarce, was found in

Cilicia in Cicero's time. See his letter to Coelius, Epist. ad Diversos,

Lib. II., Ep. 11.

The British wild ox is extinct except in a few English and Scottish

parks, while in Irish bogs of no great apparent antiquity are found

antlers which testify to the former existence of a stag much larger than

any extant European species. Two large graminivorous or browsing

quadrupeds, the ur and the schelk, once common in Germany, have been

utterly extirpated, the eland and the auerochs nearly so. The

Nibelungen-Lied, which, in the oldest form preserved to us, dates from

about the year 1200, though its original composition no doubt belongs to

an earlier period, thus sings:

Then slowe the dowghtie Sigfrid a wisent and an elk, he smote four

stoute uroxen and a grim and sturdie schelk. [Footnote: Dar nach sluoger

schiere, einen wisent unde elch. Starker ure viere, unt einen grimmen

schelch. XVI. Aventiure.

The testimony of the Nibelungen-Lied is not conclusive evidence that

these quadrupeds existed in Germany at the time of the composition of

that poem. It proves too much; for, a few lines above those just quoted,

Sigfrid is said to have killed a lion, an animal which the most

patriotic Teuton will hardly claim as a denizen of mediaeval Germany.]

Modern naturalists identify the elk with the eland, the wisent with the

auerochs. The period when the ur and the schelk became extinct is not

known. The auerochs survived in Prussia until the middle of the last

century, but unless it is identical with a similar quadruped said to be

found on the Caucasus, it now exists only in the Russian imperial forest

of Bialowitz where about a thousand are still preserved, and in some

great menageries, as for example that at Schonbrunn, near Vienna, which,

in 1852, had four specimens. The eland, which is closely allied to the

American wapiti if not specifically the same animal, is still kept in

the royal preserves of Prussia, to the number of four or five hundred

individuals. The chamois is becoming rare, and the ibex or steinbock,

once common in all the high Alps, is now believed to be confined to the

Cogne mountains in Piedmont, between the valleys of the Dora Baltea and

the Orco, though it is said that a few still linger about the Grandes

Jorasses near Cormayeur.

The chase, which in early stages of human life was a necessity, has

become with advancing civilization not merely a passion but a

dilettanteism, and the cruel records of this pastime are among the most

discreditable pages in modern literature. It is true that in India and

other tropical countries, the number and ferocity of the wild beasts not

only justify but command a war of extermination against them, but the

indiscriminate slaughter of many quadrupeds which are favorite objects

of the chase can urge no such apology. Late official reports from India

state the number of human victims of the tiger, the leopard, the wolf

and other beasts of prey, in ten "districts," at more then twelve

thousand within three years, and we are informed on like authority that

within the last six years more than ten thousand men, women, and

children have perished in the same way in the Presidency of Bengal

alone. One tiger, we are told, had killed more than a hundred people,

and finally stopped the travel on an important road, and another had

caused the desertion of thirteen villages and thrown 250 square miles

out of cultivation. In such facts we find abundant justification of the

slaying of seven thousand tigers, nearly six thousand leopards, and

twenty-five hundred other ravenous beasts in the Bengal Presidency, in

the space of half a dozen years. But the humane reader will not think

the value of the flesh, the skin, and other less important products of

inoffensive quadrupeds a satisfactory excuse for the ravages committed

upon them by amateur sportsmen as well as by professional hunters. In

1861, it was computed that the supply of the English market with ivory

cost the lives of 8,000 elephants. Others make the number much larger

and it is said that half as much ivory is consumed in the United States

as in Great Britain. In Ceylon, where the elephants are numerous and

destructive to the crops, as well as dangerous to travellers, while

their tusks are small and of comparatively little value, the government

pays a small reward for killing them. According to Sir Emerson Tennant,

[Footnote: Natural History of Ceylon, chap. iv.] in three years prior to

1848, the premium was paid for 3,500 elephants in a part of the northern

district, and between 1851 and 1856 for 2,000 in the southern district.

Major Rogers, famous as an elephant shooter in Ceylon, ceased to count

his victims after he had slain 1,300, and Cumming in South Africa

sacrificed his hecatombs every month.

In spite of the rarity of the chamois, his cautious shyness, and the

comparative inaccessibility of his favorite haunts, Colani of

Pontresina, who died in 1837, had killed not less than 2,000 of these

animals; Kung, who is still living in the Upper Engadine, 1,500; Hitz,

1,300, and Zwichi an equal number; Soldani shot 1,100 or 1,200 in the

mountains which enclose the Val Bregaglia, and there are many living

hunters who can boast of having killed from 500 to 800 of these

interesting quadrupeds. [Footnote: Although it is only in the severest

cold of winter that the chamois descends to the vicinity of grounds

occupied by man, its organization does not confine it to the mountains.

In the royal park of Racconigi, on the plain a few miles from Turin, at

a height of less than 1,000 feet, is kept a herd of thirty or forty

chamois, which thrive and breed apparently as well as in the Alps.]

In America, the chase of the larger quadrupeds is not less destructive.

In a late number of the American Naturalist, the present annual

slaughter of the bison is calculated at the enormous number of 500,000,

and the elk, the moose, the caribou, and the more familiar species of

deer furnish, perhaps, as many victims. The most fortunate deer-hunter I

have personally known in New England had killed but 960; but in the

northern part of the State of New York, a single sportsman is said to

have shot 1,500, and this number has been doubtless exceeded by zealous

Nimrods of the West.

But so far as numbers are concerned, the statistics of the furtrade

furnish the most surprising results. Russia sends annually to foreign

markets not less than 20,000,000 squirrel skins, Great Britain has

sometimes imported from South America 600,000 nutria skins in a year.

The Leipzig market receives annually nearly 200,000 ermine, and the

Hudson Bay Company is said to have occasionally burnt 20,000 ermine

skins in order that the market might not be overstocked. Of course

natural reproduction cannot keep pace with this enormous destruction,

and many animals of much interest to natural science are in imminent

danger of final extirpation. [Footnote: Objectionable as game laws are,

they have done something to prevent the extinction of many quadrupeds,

which naturalists would be loth to lose, and, as in the case of the

British ox, private parks and preserves have saved other species from

destruction. Some few wild aminals, such as the American mink, for

example, have been protected and bred with profit, and in Pennsylvania

an association of gentlemen has set apart, and is about enclosing, a

park of 16,000 acres for the breeding of indigenous quadrupeds and

fowls.]

LARGE MARINE ANIMALS RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT IN GEOGRAPHY.

Vast as is the bulk of some of the higher orders of aquatic animals,

their remains are generally so perishable that, even where most

abundant, they do not appear to be now forming permanent deposits of any

considerable magnitude; but it is quite otherwise with shell-fish, and,

as we shall see hereafter, with many of the minute limeworkers of the

sea. There are, on the southern coast of the United States, beds of

shells so extensive that they were formerly supposed to have been

naturally accumulated, and were appealed to as proofs of an elevation of

the coast by geological causes; but they are now ascertained to have

been derived chiefly from oysters and other shell-fish, consumed in the

course of long ages by the inhabitants of Indian towns. The planting of

a bed of oysters in a new locality might very probably lead, in time, to

the formation of a bank, which, in connection with other deposits, might

perceptibly affect the line of a coast, or, by changing the course of

marine currents, or the outlet of a river, produce geographical changes

of no small importance.

INTRODUCTION AND BREEDING OF FISH.