THE SHOOTING OF THE 
FUTURE 
A LOOK BACKWARD 
When the white men came to America they found 
wild birds and animals very abundant. The repro- 
ductive energy of indigenous species more than made 
up for their destruction by natural enemies. Human 
beings were not numerous in proportion to the area of 
the land, and took only what they needed. The balance 
of nature was preserved. 
It was rudely disturbed by the arrival of civilized 
man with his firearms, though for a time he made little 
impression on the life of the great continent to which 
he had come. Birds and animals continued abundant, 
though close to the settlements they were soon driven 
away or destroyed. Thus Josselyn, writing in 1671. 
tells, as already said, how thirty years before turkeys 
were very abundant at Black Point, now Scarborough, 
Maine, where many broods of young might be seen in 
a morning, but that the English and the Indians have 
destroyed them, “so that ‘tis very rare to meet with a 
wild Turkie in the Woods.” This was only about fifty 
years after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. 
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