34 DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 
the power of man irreparably to derange the combinations 
of inorganic matter and of organic life, which through the 
night of sons she had been proportioning and balancing, to 
prepare the earth for his habitation, when in the fulness of time 
his Creator should call him forth to enter into its possession. 
Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the 
inorganic world are, as I have remarked, bound together by 
such mutual relations and adaptations as secure, if not the abso- 
lute permanence and equilibrium of both, a long continuance 
of the established conditions of each at any given time and 
place, or at least, a very slow and gradual succession of changes 
in those conditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing 
agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature 
are turned to discords. The proportions and accommodations 
which insured the stability of existing arrangements are over- 
thrown. Indigenous vegetable and animal species are extir- 
pated, and supplanted by others of foreign origin, spontaneous 
production is forbidden or restricted, and the face of the earth 
is vither laid bare or covered with a new and reluctant growth 
of vegetable forms, and with alien tribes of animal life. These 
intentional changes and substitutions constitute, indeed, great 
revolutions ; but vast as is their magnitude and importance, they 
are, as we shall see, insignificant in comparison with the con- 
tingent and unsought results which have flowed from them. 
The fact that, of all organic beings, man alone is to be re- 
garded as essentially a destructive power, and that he wields 
energies to resist which Nature—that nature whom all material 
life and all inorganic substance obey—is wholly impotent, tends 
to prove that, though living in physical nature, he is not of her, 
that he is of more exalted parentage, and belongs to a higher 
order of existences, than those which are born of her womb and 
live in blind submission to her dictates. 
There are, indeed, brute destroyers, beasts and birds and in- 
sects of prey—all animal life feeds upon, and, of course, destroys 
other life,—but this destruction is balanced by compensations. 
It is, in fact, the very means by which the existence of one 
