50 Modern forest Economy. 



dies, ancj on the outer borders only do we find green shoots. 

 But it is not impossible, it is only difi&cult, for man, with- 

 out renouncing the advantage of culture itself, one day to 

 make reparation for the injury which he has inflicted : he 

 is appointed lord of creation. True it is that thorns and 

 thistles, ill-favoured and pioisonous plants, well named by 

 botanists " rubbish plants," mark the track which man has 

 proudly traversed through the earth. Before him lay 

 original nature in ^her wild but sublime beauty, behind 

 him he leaves the desert, a deformed and ruined land ; for 

 childish desire of destruction, or thoughtless squandering 

 of vegetable treasures, have destroyed the character of 

 nature ; and man himself flies terrified from the arena of 

 his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to barbarous 

 races or animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin 

 beauty smiles before him. Here again, in selfish pursuit 

 of profit, consciously or unconsciously, he begins anew the 

 work of destruction. Thus did cultivation, driven out, 

 leave the East and the deserts perhaps previously robbed 

 of their coverings. Like the wild hordes of old over beau- 

 tiful Greece, thus rolls this conquest with fearful rapidity 

 from east to west through America ; and the planter often 

 now leaves the already exhausted land, the eastern climate 

 becoming infertile through the demolition of the forests, to 

 introduce a similar revolution into the far west. But we 

 see, too, that the nobler races, or truly cultivated men, 

 even now raise their warning voices, put their small hand 

 to the mighty work of restoring to nature her strength and 

 fulness in yet a higher stage than that of wild nature : 

 one dependent on the law of purpose given by man, 

 arranged according to plans which are copied from the 

 development of manhood itself. All this, indeed, remains 

 at present but a powerless, and for the whole, an insigni- 

 ficantly small enterprise, but it preserves the faith in the 

 vocation of man and his power to fulfil it. In future times 

 he will and must, when he rules, leads, and protects the 

 whole, free nature from the tyrannous slavery to which he 

 now abases her, and in which he can only keep her by 



