366 THE EFFAGEMENT OF NATURE BY MAN 



can see, if man continues to act in the reckless way 

 which has characterised his behaviour hitherto, he will 

 multiply to such an enormous extent that only a few 

 kinds of animals and plants which serve him for food and 

 fuel will be left on the face of the globe. It is not im- 

 probable that even these will eventually disappear, and 

 man will be indeed monarch of all he surveys. He will 

 have converted the gracious earth, once teeming with 

 innumerable, incomparably beautiful varieties of life, into 

 a desert or, at best, a vast agricultural domain abandoned 

 to the production of food-stuffs for the hungry millions 

 which, like maggots consuming a carcase, or the irre- 

 pressible swarms of the locust, incessantly devour and 

 multiply. 



Another glacial period or an overwhelming catastrophe 

 of cosmic origin may fortunately, at some distant epoch, 

 check the blind process of destruction of natural things 

 and the insane pullulation of humanity. But there are, 

 it seems probable, many centuries of what would seem to 

 the men of to-day deplorable ugliness and cramping 

 pressure in store for posterity unless an unforeseen 

 awakening of the human race to the inevitable results of 

 its present recklessness should occur. Whatever may be 

 the ultimate fate of the life of the earth under man's 

 operations, we should endeavour at this moment to delay, 

 as far as possible, the hateful consummation looming 

 ahead of us. 



It is interesting to note a few instances of man's destruc- 

 tive action. Even in prehistoric times it is probable 'that 

 man, by hunting the mammoth the great hairy elephant 

 assisted in its extinction, if he did not actually bring it 

 about. At a remote prehistoric period the horses of 

 various kinds which abounded in North and South 

 America rapidly and suddenly became extinct. It has 

 been suggested, with some show of probability, that a 



