September io, 19 14] 



NATURE 



41 



of the South ; and the rise of the South — notably of 

 Australia — is the direct result of human agency, on 

 one hand transforming the surface of the land, 

 on the other eliminating distance. The old name of 

 Australia, as we all know, was New Holland. The 

 name was well chosen in view of later history, for 

 while no two parts of the world could be more unlike 

 one another than the little corner of Europe known as 

 Holland, or the Netherlands, and the great Southern 

 Continent, in one and in the other man has been 

 pre-eminently a geographical agency. 



The writer who used this phrase, "Man is a geo- 

 graphical agency," the American writer, Mr. G. P. 

 Marsh, published his book, "Man and Nature," in 

 1864, and a new edition, entitled "The Earth as Modi- 

 fied by Human Action," in 1874. He was mainly 

 concerned with the destructiveness of man in the 

 geographical and climatic changes which he has 

 effected. " Ever}'^ plant, every animal," he writes, 

 " is a geographical agency, man a destructive, vege- 

 tables, and in some cases even wild beasts, restorative 

 powers " ; and again : " It is in general true that the 

 intervention of man has hitherto seemed to ensure the 

 final exhaustion, ruin, and desolation of every province 

 of Nature which he has reduced to his dominion." 

 'The more civilised man has become, he tells us, the 

 more he has destroyed. " Purely untutored humanity 

 interferes comparatively little with the arrangements 

 of Nature, and the destructive agency of man becomes 

 "^ore and more energetic and unsparing as he ad- 

 nces in civilisation." In short, in his opinion, 

 ijctter fifty years of Cathay than a cycle of Europe." 

 He took this gloomy view mainly on account of the 

 mischief done by cutting down forests. Man has 

 wrought this destruction not only with his own hand, 

 but through domesticated animals more destructive 

 than wild beasts, sheep, goats, horned cattle, stunting 

 or killing the young shoots of trees. Writing of 

 Tunisia, Mr. Perkins, the Principal of Roseworthy 

 College, says: "In so far as young trees and shrubs 

 are concerned, the passage of a flock of goats will 

 do quite as much damage as a bush fire." ]SIr. Marsh 

 seems to have met a fool in the forest, and it was 

 man ; and he found him to be more knave than fool, 

 for man has been, in Mr. Marsh's view, the revolu- 

 tionar}- Radical confiscating Nature's vested interests. 

 "Man," he says, "has too long forgotten that the 

 earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for con- 

 sumption, still less for profligate waste." Trees, to 

 his mind, are Conservatives of the best kind. They 

 stand in the way, it is true, but they stop excesses, 

 they moderate the climate, they give shelter against 

 the wind, they store the water, prevent inundations, 

 preserve and enrich the soil. "The clearing of the 

 woods," he says, "has in some cases produced within 

 two or three generations effects as blasting as those 

 generally ascribed to geological convulsions, and has 

 jaid waste the face of the earth more hopelessly than 

 if it had been buried by a current of lava or a shower 

 of volcanic sand " ; and, once more, where forests have 

 been destroyed, he says, "The face of the earth is no 

 longer a sponge but a dust-heap." 



The damage done by cutting down trees, and thereby 

 letting loose torrents which wash away the soil, is or 

 was very marked in the south of France, in Dauphin^, 

 Provence, and the French Alps. With the felling of 

 trees and the pasturing of sheep on the upper edge of 

 the forest — for sheep break the soil and expose the 

 roots — the higher ground has been laid bare. Rain- 

 storms have in consequence swept off the soil, and the 

 floods have devastated the valleys. The mountain- 

 sides have become deserts, and the vallevs have been 

 turned into swamps. "When they destroyed the 

 forest." wrote the great French geographer. Rectus, 



NO. 2341, VOL. 94] 



about thirty years ago, "they also destroyed the very 

 ground on which it stood " ; and then he continues : 

 " The devastating action of the streams in the French 

 Alps is a verj- curious phenomenon from the historical 

 point of view, for it explains why so many of the 

 districts of Syria, Greece, Asia Minor, Africa, and 

 Spain have been forsaken by their inhabitants. l"he 

 men have disappeared along with the trees ; the axe of 

 the woodman, no less than the sword of the conqueror, 

 has put an end to, or transplanted, entire fxjpula- 

 tions." In the latter part of the South African war 

 Sir William Willcocks, skilled in irrigation in Egypt, 

 and now reclaiming Mesopotamia, was brought to 

 South Africa to report upon the possibilities of irriga- 

 tion there, and in his report dated November 190 1 he 

 wrote as follows : " Seeing in Basutoland the effect of 

 about thirt} years of cultivation and more or less 

 intense habitation convinced me of the fact that 

 another country with steep slopes and thin depth of 

 soil, like Palestine, has been almost completely 

 denuded by hundreds of years of cultivation and intense 

 habits. The Palestine which Joshua conquered and 

 which the children of Israel inhabited was in all prob- 

 abilitA- covered over great part of its area by sufficient 

 earth to provide food for a population a hundred times 

 as dense as that which can be supported to-day." The 

 Scotch geologist, Hugh Miller, again, attributed the 

 formation of the Scotch mosses to the cutting down 

 of timber by Roman soldiers. "What had &en an 

 overturned forest became in the course of years a deep 

 morass." 



In past times there have been voices raised in favour 

 of the forests, but they Eave been voices crying in the 

 desert which man has made. Here is one. The old 

 chronicler Holinshed, who lived in the reign of Queen 

 Elizabeth, noted the amount of timber cut dovm for 

 house building and in order to increase the area for 

 pasturage. " Every small occasion in my time," he 

 writes, "is enough to cut down a great wood"; and 

 in another passage either he himself or one of his 

 collaborators writes that he would wish to live to see 

 four things reformed in England : "The want of dis- 

 cipline in the Church, the covetous dealing of most of 

 our merchants in the preferment of commodities of 

 other countries and hindrance of their own, the holding 

 of fairs and markets upon the Sunday to be abolished 

 and referred to the Wednesdays, and that every man 

 in whatever part of the champaine soil enjoyeth forty 

 acres of land and upwards after that rate, either by 

 free deed, copyhold or fee farm, might plant one acre 

 of wood or sow the same with oke mast, hazell, beach, 

 and sufficient provision be made that it be cherished 

 and kept." 



Mr. Marsh seems to have thought that the Old 

 World, and especially the countries which formed the 

 old Roman Empire, had been ruined almost past re- 

 demption ; and for the beneficent action of man on 

 Nature he looked across the seas. " Australia and New 

 Zealand," he uxites, "are perhaps the countries from 

 which we have a right to expect the fullest elucidation 

 of these difficult and disputable problems. Here exist 

 greater facilities and stronger motives for the careful 

 study of the topics in question than have ever been 

 found combined in any other theatre of Europ>ean 

 colonisation." 



His book was first written half a century ago. He 

 Ijias a pessimist evidently, and pessimists exaggerate 

 even more than optimists, for there is nothing more 

 exhilarating and consoling to ourselves than to predict 

 the worst possible consequences from our neighbour's 

 folly. Further, though it may be true that man 

 became more destructive as he became more civilised, 

 it is also true that the destruction has been wrought 

 directlv rather bv the unscientific than bv the man of 



