THE WILDERNESS AT THE PRESENT DAY. 15 



many subjects of interest and importance demand our 

 attention, The Wilderness and its Tenants may perhaps 

 appear to some to be one which from a practical 

 point of view is too remote to be of much general 

 interest. 



Yet when we come to consider the matter a little 

 more closely, we become aware that, taking the sur- 

 face of the terrestrial globe as a whole, even now but 

 little more than one half the habitable portion of it 

 is more than nominally in the hands of civilized man 

 while the remainder (though of course in varying 

 degrees) is either in the hands of semi-civilized, or of 

 wholly uncivilized races. 



The march of progress, and the innumerable demands 

 created by a highly organized state of society, such 

 as we have become accustomed to, makes the very 

 idea of remaining stationary a matter of impossibility. 

 So incessant are the changes that, as we know, new 

 and useful inventions have in the present day some- 

 times become actually obsolete before they have had 

 time to come into general notice. We can therefore 

 hardly realize that, alongside of all this feverish haste 

 and enterprise, there co-exists a condition of affairs 

 where everything is diametrically the reverse of all this. 



Yet, the moment we come to consider this question 

 of "The Wilderness and its Tenants," we find that the 

 thing which strikes us most forcibly is the changeless 

 aspect of everything. 



Here, nothing ever becomes obsolete or out of date. 

 The hand of Nature has itself arranged the landscape, 

 down to its minutest details and as for the men whom 

 the accident of birth has placed there, the self-same 

 manners, customs, and dress, exist, so far as we can 



