38 
DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 
The earth was not, in its natural condition, completely 
adapted to the use of man, but only to the sustenance of wild 
animals and wild vegetation. These live, multiply their kind 
in just proportion, and attain their perfect measure ot strength 
and beauty, without producing or requiring any change in the 
natural arrangements of surface, or in each other’s spontaneous 
tendencies, except such mutual repression of excessive increase 
as may prevent the extirpation of one species by the encroach¬ 
ments of another. In short, without man, lower animal and 
spontaneous vegetable life would have been constant in type, 
distribution, and proportion, and the physical geography of the 
earth would have remained undisturbed for indefinite periods, 
and been subject to revolution only from possible, unknown 
cosmical causes, or from geological action. 
But man, the domestic animals that serve him, the field 
and garden plants the products of which supply him with 
food and clothing, cannot subsist and rise to the full devel¬ 
opment of their higher properties, unless brute and uncon¬ 
scious nature be effectually combated, and, in a great degree, 
vanquished by human art. Hence, a certain measure of trans¬ 
formation of terrestrial surface, of suppression of natural, and 
stimulation of artificially modified productivity becomes neces¬ 
sary. This measure man has unfortunately exceeded. He has 
felled the forests whose network of fibrous roots bound the 
mould to the rocky skeleton of the earth ; but had he allowed 
here and there a belt of woodland to reproduce itself by spon¬ 
taneous propagation, most of the mischiefs which his reckless 
destruction of the natural protection of the soil has occasioned 
would have been averted. He has broken up the mountain 
reservoirs, the percolation of whose waters through unseen 
channels supplied the fountains that refreshed his cattle and 
fertilized his fields; but he has neglected to maintain the 
cisterns and the canals of irrigation which a wise antiquity 
tilized and lost in refining and melting, and upon scraping the chimneys 
of the melting furnaces and the roofs of the adjacent houses, gold enough 
was found in the soot to account for no small part of the deficiency. 
