THE HUMAN OR PRESENT PERIOD. 541 



inaugurated, and began to counteract the provincial tendency. This 

 has been greatly accelerated in the past few decades, supplemented 

 by swift land-transportation and by electric communication, and is 

 rapidly involving the whole race in a cosmopolitan movement. Almost 

 the whole world is already in daily communication, and almost all the 

 races are more or less habitually intermingling by travel and trade. 

 That this is to become more and more habitual until the whole race 

 shall be in constant intercommunication, is not to be questioned. 

 There will then have been inaugurated the most marked period of 

 cosmopolitanism, in all senses of the term, which the world has ever 

 witnessed. With this will doubtless come endless blood-mingling, and 

 the racial divergences of the past will be replaced by racial conver- 

 gences in the future. What this will ultimately mean for the race 

 we will not venture to predict. 



Man as a geological agency. — The earlier geologists were inclined 

 to regard man's agency in geological progress as rather trivial, per- 

 haps because physiographic geology, in which his influence is chiefly 

 felt, was then less cultivated than marine, volcanic, and hypogeic 

 geology, in which he scarcely participates. But probably no pre- 

 vious agent in an equal period of time has so greatly influenced the 

 life of the land, both plant and animal, and the rate of land-degrada- 

 tion, as has man since the full inauguration of the present agricultural 

 epoch, and particularly in the last century (Vol. I, pp. 649-651). 

 That this influence will be increased during coming centuries seems 

 clearly foreshadowed. The flora is rapidly passing from that which 

 had been evolved by natural agencies through the long ages, to that 

 which man selects for cultivation or preservation, together with that 

 which has taken advantage of the special conditions he furnishes. 

 With the further progress of this movement, the native floras seem 

 destined to an early extinction. The same may be said of the native 

 faunas. The favored animals, under man's care, flourish beyond 

 precedent, while the rest, so far as they are within his reach, are suffer- 

 ing rapid declines that look toward extinction. The life of the sea 

 is less profoundly affected than that of the land, but even that does 

 not escape important modifications. The most pronounced exceptions 

 to man's dominance, and those that bid fair to contest his suprem- 

 acy longest, are found in organisms too minute to be easily con- 

 trolled by man, and in organisms that, quite against his wish, flourish 



