GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION. 605 



After this long succession of physical revolutions, man appears as 

 a denizen of the Europe thus prepared for him. The earliest records 

 of his presence reveal him as a fisher and hunter, with rude flint-pointed 

 spear and harpoon. And doubtless for many a dim century such was 

 his condition. He made no more impress on external nature than one 

 of the beasts which he chased. But in course of time, as civilization 

 grew, he asserted his claim to be one of the geographical forces of the 

 globe. Not content with gathering the fruits and capturing the ani- 

 mals which he found needful for his wants, he gradually entered on a 

 contest with Nature to subdue the earth and to possess it. Nowhere 

 has this warfare been fought out so vigorously as on the surface of 

 Europe. On the one hand, wide dark regions of ancient forest have 

 given place to smiling cornfields. Peat and moor have made way for 

 pasture and tillage. On the other hand, by the clearance of woodlands 

 the rainfall has been so diminished that drought and barrenness have 

 spread where verdure and luxuriance once prevailed. Rivers have 

 been straightened and made to keep their channels, the sea has been 

 barred back from its former shores. For many generations the sur- 

 face of the continent has been covered with roads, villages, and towns, 

 bridges, aqueducts, and canals, to which this century has added a mul- 

 titudinous network of railways, with their embankments and tunnels. 

 In short, wherever man has lived, the ground beneath him bears wit- 

 ness to his presence. It is slowly covered with a stratum either wholly 

 formed by him or due in great measure to his operations. The soil 

 under old cities has been increased to a depth of many feet by the rub- 

 bish of his buildings ; the level of the streets of modern Rome stands 

 high above that of the pavement of the Caesars, and that again above 

 the roadways of the early republic. Over cultivated fields his pot- 

 sherds are turned up in abundance by the plow. The loam has risen 

 within the walls of his graveyards as generation after generation has 

 moldered into dust. 



It must be owned that man, in most of his struggles with the world 

 around him, has fought blindly for his own ultimate interests. His 

 contest, successful for the moment, has too often led to sure and sad 

 disaster. Stripping forests from hill and mountain, he has gained his 

 immediate object in the possession of their abundant stores of tim- 

 ber ; but he has laid open the slopes to be parched by drought, or to 

 be swept bare by rain. Countries once rich in beauty, and plenteous 

 in all that was needful for his support, are now burned and barren, or 

 almost denuded of their soil. Gradually he has been taught by his 

 own bitter experience, that while his aim still is to subdue the earth, 

 he can attain it, not by setting Nature and her laws at defiance, but by 

 enlisting them in his service. He has learned at last to be the minister 

 and interpreter of Nature, and he finds in her a ready and unrepining 

 slave. 



In fine, looking back across the long cycles of change through which 



