648 
NATURE 
| April 28, 1870 
position has the best chance of succeeding. For this 
high position means energy under another form. It 
means that at some remote period a vast amount of 
personal energy was expended in raising the family into 
this high position. The founder of the family had, doubt- 
less, greater energy than most of his fellows, and spent it 
in raising himself and his family into a position of 
advantage. The personal element may have long since 
disappeared from the family, but not before it had been 
transmuted into something else, in virtue of which the 
present representative is able to accomplish a great deal, 
owing solely to the high position which he has acquired 
through the efforts of another. We thus see that in the 
social world we have what may justly be termed two kinds 
of energy, namely :— 
r. Actual or personal energy. 
2, Energy derived from position. 
Let us now again turn to the physical world. In this, 
as in the social world, it is difficult to ascend. The force 
of gravity may be compared to that force which keeps a 
man down in the world. If a stone be shot upwards 
with great velocity, it may be said to have in it a 
great deal of actual energy, because it has the power 
of doing useful work or of overcoming up to a great 
height the obstacle interposed by gravity to its ascent, 
just as a man of great energy has the power of over- 
coming obstacles. But this stone as it continues to 
mount upwards will do so with a gradually decreasing 
velocity, until at the summit of its flight all the actual 
energy with which it started will have been spent in rais- 
ing it against the force of gravity to this elevated position. 
It is now moving with no velocity—just, in fact, beginning 
to turn—and we may suppose it to be caught and lodged 
upon the top of a house. Here, then, it remains at rest, 
without the slightest tendency to motion of any kind, and 
we are led to ask what has become of the energy with 
which it began its flight? Has this energy disappeared 
from the universe without leaving behind it any equiva- 
lent? Is it lost for ever, and utterly wasted? But the 
answer to this question must be reserved for another 
article. BALFOUR STEWART 
LEGISLATION AND NATURE 
ae effect of Legislation upon Nature is one of those 
far-reaching subjects which men are only just begin- 
ning to investigate in a practical spirit. It is, of course, 
only a minor branch of the larger question of man’s in- 
fluence upon all external life and forms, but it has its 
special attractions, nevertheless, and may be pursued to 
advantage as an independent study. Incidentally, it illus- 
trates many other problems. The diminutiveness of the 
Hindu cow, for example, may be due as much to the 
legislation which has made the domesticated animal sacred 
as to the nature of the climate of Hindustan. It is quite 
possible the oxen of this country would not have exhibited 
such a variety of forms and sizes had we selected one 
species and made it sacred some two or three thousand 
years ago. Take, again, the subject of maritime canals, 
which is now in its infancy. The Suez Canal has not 
existed long enough to have had any appreciable effect, 
either in modifying the coast-lines of the Mediterranean, 
or in creating any interchange of marine species; but it 
is likely enough to be one of a series, and we cannot pre- 
dict what may be their effects. The diversion of the 
Nile may prove a serious matter, and now the Darien 
scheme has revived, a great impetus has been given to 
speculation, so that an ingenious projector has actually 
sketchedacanal which should unite the Bristol Channel with 
the English Channel. Two more illustrations may suffice 
to make my meaning clear. There seems little apparent 
connection between woods and national greatness, but, 
nevertheless, the relation is a real one. When Spain lost 
the empire of the seas, she lost it from two causes—im- 
poverished finances, due to a speculative trade in precious 
metals, and want of woods to build her ships. Her 
people had a foolish prejudice against trees, and an arid 
climate and reduced shipbuilding were the results. From 
Danzig to Pillau once stretched a thick pine forest. 
When King Frederic William I. was in want of money, 
one Herr Von Korff recommended its destruction. The 
experiment was a financial success, but the State was 
injured by it. As Willibald Alexis states, “ the sea-winds 
rushed over the bared hills; the Frische Haff is half 
choked with sand ; the channel between Elbing, the sea, 
and Kénigsberg is endangered ; and the fisheries in the 
Haff injured. The operation of Herr Von Korff brought 
the King 200,000 thalers. The State would now willingly 
expend millions to restore the forests again.’’ 
Neither directly nor indirectly, in fact, can we touch 
nature by our laws, without beginning a new chain of 
causes, the end of which we cannot foresee. The con- 
sequences of human volition are always a little wonder- 
ful. When the treasures of Thorwaldsen were packed up 
in Rome, it was not dréamed that new plants would be 
conveyed to Copenhagen in the grasses of the Campagna, 
any more than Clusius, the first European writer who 
mentions the potato, could possibly foresee that half the 
miseries of Ireland would spring from its exclusive culti- 
vation. What we owe to our game-laws, again, is a 
boundless subject which might be investigated by a 
naturalist with profit. 
My immediate purpose, however, is—strange as it may 
seem—with Mr. Lowe and his Budget. He deserves to 
be styled a real friend to the farmer, though ap- 
parently he has only given him a restricted use 
of germinating barley. Readers of Darwin will re- 
member how he traces the connection between the num- 
ber of cats in a given locality, and the number of humble 
bees, and the abundance of red clover and heartsease. 
Well, Mr. Lowe’s Budget starts a similar House-that-Jack- 
built. The freedom of firearms from taxation affects 
their number in any district, the number of guns deter- 
mines the number of our small birds, and the number of 
our small birds affects the immunity of our fields from 
grasshoppers, cricket-moles, beetles, locusts, slugs, &c. 
Mr. Lowe was concerned for the security of life, for the 
prevention of early quasi-poaching habits, but his 1/7. tax 
may effect a revolution all the same. It is no longer a 
secret, that wherever a persistent warfare is carried on 
against small birds—against martins, blackbirds, spar- 
rows, larks, &c.—vegetable life is sure to suffer. In the 
Isle of Bourbon, as M. Michelet tells us, the martin was 
exterminated, and a plague of grasshoppers followed ; in 
Hungary, the sparrow was proscribed, until this valiant 
militia of the fields had to be recalled; in the neighbourhood 
