xiii.] VIRGIN SOILS AND WASTE LANDS. 319 



thorns and thistles, on account of man's sin and folly, 

 ignorance and greedy waste. Well said that veteran 

 botanist, the venerable Elias Fries, of Lund : 



" A broad band of waste land follows gradually in 

 the steps of cultivation. If it expands, its centre and 

 its cradle dies, and on the outer borders only do we 

 find green shoots. But it is not impossible, only 

 difficult, for man, without renouncing the advantage 

 of culture itself, one day to make reparation for the 

 injury which he has inflicted : he is appointed lord of 

 creation. True it is that thorns and thistles, ill- 

 favoured and poisonous plants, well named by botanists 

 rubbish plants, mark the track which man has proudly 

 traversed through the earth. Before him lay original 

 Nature in her wild but sublime beauty. Behind him 

 he leaves the desert, a deformed and ruined land ; for 

 childish desire of destruction, or thoughtless squander- 

 ing of vegetable treasures, has destroyed the character 

 of nature; and, terrified, man himself flies from the 

 arena of his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to 

 barbarous races or to animals, so long as yet another 

 spot in virgin beauty smiles before him. Here again, 

 in selfish pursuit of profit, and consciously or un- 

 consciously following the abominable principle of the 

 great moral vileness which one man has expressed 

 1 Apres nous le Deluge ' he begins anew the work of 

 destruction. Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave 

 the East, and perhaps the deserts formerly robbed of 

 their coverings ; like the wild hordes of old over 

 beautiful Greece, thus rolls this conquest with fearful 

 rapidity from East to West through America ; and the 

 planter now often leaves the already exhausted land, 

 and the eastern climate, become infertile through the 



