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the transitory tenants of this fair and fertile earth, a little while 

 entrusted to onr keeping, despoil it of that without which hu- 

 man advancement, human existence, is impossible, and turn it 

 over sterile and impoverished to the generation we summon 

 into being, and charge as we are charged, with the great 

 destiny of man ? Is not this to tempt the creating Providence ? 

 Through the dark infinitude of countless ages while night 

 brooded over chaos, to that dawn when light was kindled in 

 the heavens, and the morning stars sang together,- and through 

 all the rounds of change that light has shone upon since light 

 was, this fragment earth has been preparing for the habitation 

 of the sons of men. By fire and furnace heats, and icy con- 

 gelations, by the lava torrent, and the grinding glacier, by the 

 earthquake and the volcano, the upheaval of mountains, the 

 ocean's deluge and the river's flood, by tempest and whirlwind, 

 by the powerful action of the sun through eons of alternating 

 day and night and ever revolving seasons, by the kingdoms of 

 vegetable and animal life whose multitudinous tribes ruled by 

 Rhizodont and Mastodon are now extinct, the moist, absorb- 

 ent, fluent, vibratory atmosphere is evolved and purified, the 

 solid rock is made and crumbled, and its powdered grains 

 sorted and washed and mingled in the loam and mould, the 

 flow and distribution of the waters are fixed, and all things 

 toned to the temperature that suits the home of man. Through 

 all the cataclysms of the world, the minerals of the harvest 

 have been borne as in the ark that bore the fate of man upon 

 the waters of the flood, until at last they have been safely 

 garnered up in the ripe and fruitful soil. To take from the 

 earth this precious diamond dust and not restore it, to destroy 

 the providential uses of these costly products of all time, and 

 so imperil man and his dominion, is it not a sin against the 

 creation, is it not a forbidden thing, as truly as though the in- 

 junction had been graven on the tables of stone, and thundered 

 from Sinai with the commandment, " Thou shalt not steal ?" 



Let an advancing morality teach our duty to the soil. It is 

 but lately that the dumb and helpless brute was protected from 



