CHARACTER OF MAN’S ACTION. 
41 
sity of preserving what is left, if not of restoring what has 
been wantonly wasted. The wandering savage grows no cul¬ 
tivated vegetable, fells no forest, and extirpates no useful 
plant, no noxious weed. If his skill in the chase enables him 
to entrap numbers of the animals on which he feeds, he com¬ 
pensates this loss by destroying also the lion, the tiger, the 
wolf, the otter, the seal, and the eagle, thus indirectly protect¬ 
ing the feebler quadrupeds and fish and fowls, which would 
otherwise become the booty of beasts and birds of prey. But 
with stationary life, or rather with the pastoral state, man at 
once commences an almost indiscriminate warfare upon all the 
forms of animal and vegetable existence around him, and as 
he advances in civilization, he gradually eradicates or trans¬ 
forms every spontaneous product of the soil he occupies.* 
Human and Brute Action Compared . 
It has been maintained by authorities as high as any 
known to modern science, that the action of man upon 
nature, though greater in degree , does not differ in kind, from 
the subjugation of the inorganic forces, and the consequent extension of 
man’s sway over, not the annual products of the earth only, but her sub¬ 
stance and her springs of action, is almost entirely the work of highly re¬ 
fined and cultivated ages. The employment of the elasticity of wood and 
of horn, as a projectile power in the bow, is nearly universal among the 
rudest savages. The application of compressed air to the same purpose, in 
the blowpipe, is more restricted, and the use of the mechanical powers, 
the inclined plane, the wheel and axle, and even the wedge and lever, 
seems almost unknown except to civilized man. I have myself seen Eu¬ 
ropean peasants to whom one of the simplest applications of this latter 
power was a revelation. 
* The difference between the relations of savage life, and of incipient 
civilization, to nature, is well seen in that part of the valley of the Missis¬ 
sippi which was once occupied by the mound builders and afterward by 
the far less developed Indian tribes. When the tillers of the fields which 
must have been cultivated to sustain the large population that once inhab¬ 
ited those regions perished or were driven out, the soil fell back to the 
normal forest state, and the savages who succeeded the more advanced 
race interfered very little, if at all, with the ordinary course of spon¬ 
taneous nature. 
