PRODUCTIVENESS OF THE EARTH. 33 



THE PRODUCTIVENESS OF THE EARTH. 



From an Address before the Worcester North Agricultural Society. 



BY A. N. ARNOLD. 



We may introduce the subject by considering, first, the earth's 

 product! veness as limited by the extent of its land surface. Of 

 the 200,000,000 square miles which make up the surface of 

 this terraqueous globe, about three-fourths are covered with 

 water, leaving only about 50,000,000 square miles, or 23,000,- 

 000,000 acres of land. We might wonder that so large a 

 proportion of the earth's surface should be covered with water, 

 and be tempted to adopt the suggestion of an old writer, (I 

 think it is Sir Thomas Browne,) that " God loves fishes better 

 than men^'' if we did not know that this vast watery expanse not 

 only contributes to the fertility of the continents, but is abso- 

 lutely necessary to their capacity for great productiveness. So 

 great an evaporating surface is indispensable to furni^i the 

 material for watering the whole face of the ground. The boun- 

 daries of sea and land are fixed by the wisdom of the Creator, 

 and perpetuated by the natural laws which he has established, so 

 that we may not expect any considerable change in the relative 

 proportions of these two essentially different components of the 

 exterior of the globe which we inhabit. 



We know that on certain coasts, the sea has long been 

 encroaching on the land, and that on certain others, the land 

 has been crowding the water back : but these two opposite 

 movements probably nearly balance each other, or, if they do 

 not, they are so slow and limited in their action, that they do 

 not materially affect the productiveness of the earth. The pro- 

 portions of land and water over the whole globe are probably 

 not now different, by any appreciable quantity, from what they 

 were when Noah died. Human industry may do something, 

 as in Holland, to scoop out a country from the ocean, and it 

 may accomplish still more by draining lakes and marshes ; but 



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