DESTEUCTIVENESS OF MAIST, 3T 



of another. In short, without man, lower animal and sponta- 1 

 neous vegetable life would liave been practically constant in type, . 

 distribution and proportion, and the physical geography of the j 

 earth would have remained undisturbed for indefinite periods, j 

 and been subject to revolution only from slow development, , 

 from possible unknown cosmical causes, or from geological action. * 

 But man, the domestic animals that serve him, the field and 

 garden j)lants the products of which supply him with food and 

 clothing, can not subsist and rise to the full development of their 

 higher properties, unless brute and unconscious nature be effect- 

 ually combated, and, in a great degree, vanquished by human 

 art. Hence, a certain measure of transformation of terrestrial 

 surface, of suppression of natural, and stimulation of artificially 

 modified productivity becomes necessary. This measure man has 

 unfortunately exceeded. He has felled the forests whose net- 

 work of fibrous roots bound the mould to the rocky skeleton of 

 the earth ; but had he allowed here and there a belt of woodland 

 to reproduce itseK by spontaneous propagation, most of the mis- 

 chiefs which his reckless destruction of the natural protection of 

 the soil has occasioned would have been averted. He has broken 

 up the mountain reservoirs, the percolation of whose waters 

 through unseen channels supplied the fountains that refreshed 

 his cattle and fertilized his fields ; but he has neglected to main- 

 tain the cisterns and the canals of irrigation which a wise antiq- 

 uity had constructed to neutrahze the consequences of its own 

 imprudence. While he has torn the thin glebe which confined 

 the light earth of extensive plains, and has destroyed the fringe 

 of semi-aquatic 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 vegeta- 

 tion. He has ruthlessly warred on all the tril)es of animated na- 

 ture whose spoil he could convert to his o-v\ti uses, and he has not 



taken since 1851 (the date of the first London Exhibition) in the utilization 

 of substances previously regarded as waste. On the one hand will be shown 

 the waste products in all the industrial processes included in the forthcoming 

 Exhibition ; on the other hand, the useful products which have been obtained 

 from such wastes since 1851. This is intended to serve as an incentive to f\iir 

 ther researches in the same important direction. 



