68 DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 
averted. He has broken up the mountain reservoirs, the perco- 
lation of whose waters through unseen channels supplied the 
fountains that refreshed his cattle and fertilized his fields; but 
he has neglected to maintain the cisterns and the canals of 
irrigation which a wise antiquity had constructed to neutralize 
the consequences of its own imprndence. While he has torn 
the thin glebe which confined the light earth of extensive plains, 
and has destroyed the fringe of semiaquatic plants which 
skirted the coast and checked the drifting of the sea sand, he 
has failed to prevent the spreading of the dunes by clothing 
them with artificially propagated vegetation. He has ruthlessly 
warred on all the tribes of animated nature whose spoil he 
could convert to his own uses, and he has not protected the 
birds which prey on the insects most destructive to his own 
harvests. 
Purely untutored humanity, it is true, interferes compara- 
tively little with the arrangements of nature,* and the destrue- 
* It is an interesting and not hitherto sufficiently noticed fact, that the 
domestication of the organic world, so far as it has yet been achieved, be- 
longs, not indeed to the savage state, but to the earliest dawn of civilization, 
the conquest of inorganic nature almost as exclusively to the most advanced 
stages of artificial culture. Civilization has added little to the number of vege- 
table or animal species grown in our fields or bred in our foids—the cranberry 
and the wild grape being almost the only plants which the Anglo-American has 
reclaimed out of our vast native flora and added to his harvests—while, on the 
contrary, the subjugation of the inorganic forces, and the consequent extension 
of man’s sway over, not the annual products of the earth only, but her sub- 
stance and her springs of action, is almost entirely the work of highly refined 
and cultivated ages. The employment of the elasticity of wood and of horn, as 
a projectile power in the bow, is nearly universal among the rudest sayages. 
The application of compressed air to the same purpose, in the blowpipe, is 
more restricted, and the use of the mechanical powers, the inclined plane, the 
wheel and axle, and even the wedge and lever, seems almost unknown except 
to civilized man. I have myself seen European peasants to whom one of the 
simplest applications of this latter power was a revelation. 
It is familiarly known to all who have occupied themselves with the psy- 
chology and habits of the ruder races, and of persons with imperfectly 
developed intellects in civilized life, that although these humble tribes and 
individuals sacrifice, without scruple, the lives of the lower animals to the 
gratification of their appetites and the supply of their other physical wants, 
