DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 
39 
liad constructed to neutralize the consequences of its own 
imprudence. While he has torn the thin glebe which confined 
the light earth of extensive plains, and has destroyed the fringe 
of semi-aquatic plants which skirted the coast and checked 
the drifting of the sea sand, he has failed to prevent the 
spreading of the dunes by clothing them with artificially 
propagated vegetation. He has ruthlessly warred on all the 
tribes of animated nature whose spoil he could convert to his 
own uses, and he has not protected the birds which prey on 
the insects most destructive to his own harvests. 
Purely untutored humanity, it is true, interferes compara¬ 
tively little with the arrangements of nature,* and the destruc- 
* It is an interesting and not hitherto sufficiently noticed fact, that the 
domestication of the organic world, so far as it has yet been achieved, be¬ 
longs, not indeed to the savage state, but to the earliest dawn of civilization, 
the conquest of inorganic nature almost as exclusively to the most advanced 
stages of artificial culture. It is familiarly known to all who have occupied 
themselves with the psychology and habits of the ruder races, and of per¬ 
sons with imperfectly developed intellects in civilized life, that although 
these humble tribes and individuals sacrifice, without scruple, the lives of 
the lower animals to the gratification of their appetites and the supply of 
their other physical wants, yet they nevertheless seem to cherish with 
brutes, and even with vegetable life, sympathies which are much more 
feebly felt by civilized men. The popular traditions of the simpler peoples 
recognize a certain community of nature between man, brute animals, and 
even plants; and this serves to explain why the apologue or fable, which 
ascribes the power of speech and the faculty of reason to birds, quadrupeds, 
insects, flowers, and trees, is one of the earliest forms of literary compo- 
siticn. 
In almost every wild tribe, some particular quadruped or bird, though 
persecuted as a destroyer of more domestic beasts, or hunted for food, is 
regarded with peculiar respect, one might almost say, affection. Some of 
the North American aboriginal nations celebrate a propitiatory feast to the 
manes of the intended victim before they commence a bear hunt; and the 
Norwegian peasantry have not only retained an old proverb which ascribes 
to the same animal u ti Mcends StyrJce og tolv Mcends Vid ,” ten men’s 
strength and twelve men’s cunning; but they still pay to him something 
of the reverence with which ancient superstition invested him. The 
student of Icelandic literature will find in the saga of Finnbogi Unn rami 
a curious illustration of this feeling, in an account of a dialogue botween a 
