182 



ON ZOOLOGICAL SYSTEMS, AND THE 



by rapacious beasts and reptiles, of putrid swamps crowded by myriads of 

 venomous insects, and of immense warrens burrowed by countless hordes 

 of the hampster, the mole-rat, and the white ant. Even here, however, 

 wherever life exists, it exists to those that possess it as an enjoyment ; while 

 these very scenes and these very animals only fill up what man has no occa- 

 sion for, and equally and instantly disappear as soon as he presents himself, 

 and exercises that industry and ingenuity which alone constitute his authority ; 

 and upon which alone his health and his happiness are made to depend. 



But this is not all. — While in their different gradations these outcasts from 

 man are thus enjoying life themselves, they are preparing, in the best manner 

 possible, the various tracts they occupy for his future use and habitation. 

 The soil that supports us, and gives us our daily bread, is nothing but a mix- 

 ture of animal and vegetable materials ; other substances, indeed, enter into 

 it, but the great, the important, the active, and leavening constituent is of an 

 organized origin. These materials, then, are perpetually forming and accu- 

 mulating, and rising into an unbounded and inexhaustible storehouse of sub- 

 sequent riches and plenty by the alternate generation and decomposition of 

 the different kinds and orders of plants and animals which thus fill up, and, as 

 we are apt to believe, encumber the regions we are contemplating ; regions 

 which, though in our own day unexplored or abandoned both by savage and 

 civilized man. may, in that revolution of countries and of governments which 

 is perpetually passing before our eyes, become, in some future period, the 

 seat of universal dominion, the emporium of taste and elegance, of virtue and 

 the sciences. So the fairest fields of Rome were formed out of the putrid 

 Pontine marshes, and England has become what she is, from being a land of 

 bogs and of blights, of wolves, wild boars and gloomy forests. 



