368 THE EFFAGEMENT OF NATURE BY MAN 



like apes, unless (as we may hope in their case, at any 

 rate) such living monuments of human history are made 

 sacred and treated with greater care than are our ancient 

 monuments in stone. Smaller creatures, birds like the dodo 

 and the great auk and a whole troop of others less 

 familiar, have disappeared and are disappearing under the 

 human blight. Even some beautiful insects — the great 

 copper butterfly and the swallow-tail butterfly — have been 

 exterminated in England by human " progress " in the 

 shape of the drainage of the Fen country. 



But the most repulsive of the destructive results of 

 human expansion is the poisoning of rivers, and the con- 

 sequent extinction in them of fish and of well-nigh every 

 living thing, save mould and putrefactive bacteria. In the 

 Thames it will soon be a hundred years since man, by his 

 filthy proceedings, banished the glorious salmon, and 

 murdered the innocents of the eel-fare. Even at its foulest 

 time, however, the Thames mud was blood-red (really 

 " blood-red," since the colour was due to the same blood- 

 crystals which colour our own blood) with the swarms of 

 a delicate little worm like the earth-worm, which has an 

 exceptional power of living in foul water, and nourishing 

 itself upon putrid mud. In old days I have stood on 

 Hungerford Suspension Bridge and seen the mud-banks 

 as a great red band of colour, stretching for a mile along 

 the picture when th^' tide was low. In smaller streams, 

 especially in the mining and manufacturing districts of 

 England, progressive money-making man has converted 

 the most beautiful things of nature — trout streams — into 

 absolutely dead corrosive chemical sewers. The sight of 

 one of these death-stricken black filth-gutters makes one 

 shudder as the picture rises, in one's mind, of a world in 

 which all the rivers and the waters of the sea-shore will 

 be thus dedicated to acrid sterility, and the meadows and 

 hill-sides will be drenched with nauseating chemical 



