PHYSICAL CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. 49 
which his follies or his crimes have made barren or pestilential. 
Among these circumstances, the most prominent, perhaps, is 
the necessity of providing new homes for a European popula- 
tion which is increasing more rapidly than its means of subsist- 
ence, new physical comforts for classes of the people that have 
now become too much enlightened and have imbibed too much 
culture to submit to a longer deprivation of a share in the 
material enjoyments which the privileged ranks have hitherto 
monopolized. 
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-depopu- 
lated 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 “ arti- 
ficial 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 dis- 
covery in both hemispheres has brought and is still bringing to 
the knowledge and control of civilized man, not much improve- 
ment of great physical conditions is to be looked for. The 
proportion of forest is indeed to be considerably reduced, super- 
fluous waters to be drawn off, and routes of internal communica- 
tion to be constructed; but the primitive geographical and cli- 
matic features of these countries ought to be, as far as possible, 
retained. 
In reclaiming and reoccupying lands laid waste by human im- 
4 
