CHAPTER IX 

 CHAINS OF CIRCUMSTANCE 



The question of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a pro- 

 blem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a 

 circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw 

 the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic being. 



G. P. MARSH. 



IN order that he might gain a full and concrete notion of 

 the effects of man's sway over animal life, the reader has 

 been led through a forest whose trees are solid facts, whose 

 undergrowth, thickets of circumstance. There is a danger 

 that in toiling a laborious way through these thickets, he 

 may have lost sight of the wood amongst the trees. Let us 

 turn, then, from the infinite details of the process, in an 

 endeavour to gain a broad view of the results ; remembering 

 that the broad view is a limited view, remembering that the 

 human mind is not built on the principle of a fly's eye 

 that sees all ways at once, but that the span of its vision 

 is limited to steps and stages and incidents ; remembering 

 most of all that each act of man is no simple deed, done and 

 forgotten, but a complex of actions and interactions whose 

 influences spread and spread like the circles in a disturbed 

 pool, or rather that, like the sound waves impelled from a 

 bursting bomb, reach up and down and all around. To 

 recast the statement on the lines of bare demonstrable fact 

 no deeds of man permanently affect the existence of any 

 member of a fauna even in a lesser degree, but the shock 

 of the interference is felt amongst the winged creatures of 

 the air, amongst the beasts of the field and even amongst 

 the burrowers beneath the earth's surface. The widening 

 spheres of influence may be traced some distance from the 

 source of their origin, but soon their waves are intersected 

 and lost to view amidst their own reflected wavelets, and 

 amidst new waves and counter-waves from other centres of 

 disturbance. 



Granted then that the broad view is still a limited view 

 and neglects all the finer tracery of man's influence, there 

 is still something to be gained from its survey. 



