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"Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world, havedone so much to revolutionize the earth as Man, the power of an endless life, has done sincethe day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it."—H. Bushnell, Sermon on thePower of an Endless Life.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District ofNew York.
JOHN F. TROW & CO.
PRINTER, STEREOTYPER, AND ELECTROTYPER,
46, 48, & 50 Greene St., New York.
The object of the present volume is: to indicate the characterand, approximately, the extent of the changes producedby human action in the physical conditions of the globe weinhabit; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the necessityof caution in all operations which, on a large scale, interferewith the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or theinorganic world; to suggest the possibility and the importanceof the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvementof waste and exhausted regions; and, incidentally,to illustrate the doctrine, that man is, in both kind and degree,a power of a higher order than any of the other forms of animatedlife, which, like him, are nourished at the table ofbounteous nature.
In the rudest stages of life, man depends upon spontaneousanimal and vegetable growth for food and clothing, and hisconsumption of such products consequently diminishes thenumerical abundance of the species which serve his uses. Atmore advanced periods, he protects and propagates certain[Pg iv]esculent vegetables and certain fowls and quadrupeds, and, atthe same time, wars upon rival organisms which prey uponthese objects of his care or obstruct the increase of their numbers.Hence the action of man upon the organic world tendsto subvert the original balance of its species, and while it reducesthe numbers of some of them, or even extirpates them altogether,it multiplies other forms of animal and vegetable life.
The extension of agricultural and pastoral industry involvesan enlargement of the sphere of man's domain, by encroachmentupon the forests which once covered the greater part of theearth's surface otherwise adapted to his occupation. The fellingof the woods has been attended with momentous consequencesto the drainage of the soil, to the external configurationof its surface, and probably, also, to local climate; andthe importance of human life as a transforming power is, perhaps,more clearly demonstrable in the influence man has thusexerted upon superficial geography than in any other result ofhis material effort.
Lands won from the woods must be both drained and irrigated;river banks and maritime coasts must be secured bymeans of artificial bulwarks against inun