PHYSICAL IMPROVEMENT—DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 
35 
Restoration of Disturbed Harmonies . 
In reclaiming and reoccupying lands laid waste by human 
improvidence or malice, and abandoned by man, or occupied 
only by a nomade or thinly scattered population, the task of 
the pioneer settler is of a very different character. He is to 
become a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the 
damaged fabric which the negligence or the wantonness of 
former lodgers has rendered untenantable. He must aid her 
in reclothing the mountain slopes with forests and vegetable 
mould, thereby restoring the fountains which she provided to 
water them ; in checking the devastating fury of torrents, and 
bringing back the surface drainage to its primitive narrow 
channels; and in drying deadly morasses by opening the 
natural sluices which have been choked up, and cutting new 
canals for drawing off their stagnant waters. He must thus, 
on the one hand, create new reservoirs, and, on the other, 
remove mischievous accumulations of moisture, thereby equal¬ 
izing and regulating the sources of atmospheric humidity and 
of flowing water, both which are so essential to all vegetable 
growth, and, of course, to human and lower animal life. 
Destructiveness of Man. 
Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to 
him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profli¬ 
gate waste. Nature has provided against the absolute destruc¬ 
tion of any of her elementary matter, the raw material of her 
works ; the thunderbolt and the tornado, the most convulsive 
throes of even the volcano and the earthquake, being only 
phenomena of decomposition and recomposition. But she has 
left it within the power of man irreparably to derange the 
combinations of inorganic matter and of organic life, which 
through the night of aeons she had been proportioning and 
balancing, to prepare the earth for his habitation, when, in the 
fulness of time, his Creator should call him forth to enter into 
its possession. 
Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and 
