CIVILIZATION AND VEGETATION 329 



farm and garden; but individuality has been sacrificed for safety, they 

 have been conquered in the war which every man is waging against every 

 other living thing, human or other. 



Whether the Ishmaelitic role of man in nature be right or wrong, it 

 is very real, and we can not escape playing our share in that role. It 

 may be merely as competitors against other human beings, holding the 

 positions which others would like, but which we call ours; or it may be 

 as competitors against other kinds of organisms. 



On beautiful spring days, when the country calls us from desk and 

 laboratory, we see the fields turning over under the plow, the wild 

 flowers, the native shrubs, and the young trees existing, if at all, only in 

 the fence corners, the trees and other plants of the wood-lot leaping their 

 bounds only to be killed bye and bye by the cultivator. In place of the 

 variety which once covered an acre, we shall presently see only a waving 

 field of grain, wheat or barley or oats, no one of which is native ; or there 

 will come up corn in formal rows which can reach its hypertrophic 

 maturity only by the destruction of numberless smaller plants of which 

 this field was once the possession. Or the unnatural trees of an orchard 

 shade a hillside on which once stood a forest, and in place of clear 

 streams the air tinkles with the music of brooks and creeks turbid with 

 soil and perhaps infected with typhoid. 



This last is an evidence of revenge. Civilization and man do not 

 have things without struggle, although the outcome of the struggle is 

 certain. Civilization and man will triumph, but not without great 

 mortality on both sides. In the natural forest and on the natural 

 prairie, untouched by man's invasion or by fire or by other profound 

 disturbance, the balance is fairly maintained year after year. Last 

 summer in the northern Eockies, I was struck by the fact that the forest 

 does not encroach on the grass land, nor this spread into the timber. 

 Generation after generation, they are the same, with great grassy bays 

 here and there into the forest and high capes and promontories of timber 

 stretching out into the grazing land. The trees and the grasses bear and 

 shed seed year by year ; insects eat the foliage or tunnel bark and wood ; 

 parasitic fungi cause smut or rust or rot; but neither set of enemies 

 produces an epidemic or decimates the plant population, nor does the 

 population greatly change. But let man clear the land of its stable 

 native population, and the difference is at once apparent. If he attempt 

 to raise a crop, he must fight as a weed every native plant, or cut back 

 the timber to secure sunshine; he must drain his fields of excessive 

 moisture, but in such manner as to conserve enough ; he must till so that 

 fresh soil may be brought to the roots of successive crops ; and he must 

 soon begin the endless use of insecticides, fungicides and fertilizers 

 because of the apparently sudden increase in enemies and decrease in 

 fertility. This is what he pays for trying to substitute his balance of 



VOL. LXXIX.-23. 



