26 
POSSIBILITY OF RESTORATION. 
of man in other spheres of material effort; and hence, in this 
most important part of our subject, we can arrive at many 
positive generalizations, and obtain practical results of no 
small economical value. 
Importance and Possibility of Physical Pestoration. 
Many circumstances conspire to invest with great present 
interest the questions : how far man can permanently modify 
and ameliorate those physical conditions of terrestrial surface 
and climate on which his material welfare depends; how far 
he can compensate, arrest, or retard the deterioration which 
many of his agricultural and industrial processes tend to pro¬ 
duce ; and how far he can restore fertility and salubrity to soils 
which his follies or his crimes have made barren or pestilential. 
Among these circumstances, the most prominent, perhaps, is 
the necessity of providing new homes for a European popula¬ 
tion which is increasing more rapidly than its means of subsist¬ 
ence, new physical comforts for classes of the people that have 
now become too much enlightened and have imbibed too 
much culture to submit to a longer deprivation of a share in 
the material enjoyments which the privileged ranks have hith¬ 
erto monopolized. 
To supply new hives for the emigrant swarms, there are, 
first, the vast unoccupied prairies and forests of America, 
of Australia, and of many other great oceanic islands, the 
sparsely inhabited and still unexhausted soils of Southern and 
even Central Africa, and, finally, the impoverished and half- 
depopulated shores of the Mediterranean, and the interior of 
Asia Minor and the farther East. To furnish to those who 
shall remain after emigration shall have conveniently reduced 
the too dense population of many European states, those 
means of sensuous and of intellectual well-being which are 
styled “ artificial wants ” when demanded by the humble and 
the poor, bat are admitted to be “ necessaries ” when claimed 
by the noble and the rich, the soil must be stimulated to its 
highest powers of production, and man’s utmost ingenuity and 
