Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action

CTED BY TRANSFER TO FOREIGN SOILS-EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLES-ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC PLANTS-ORGANIC LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL AGENCY-ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS-EXTIRPATION OF ANIMAL

-DESTRUCTION OF FISH-INTRODUCTION AND BREEDING OF F

phy embraces

they inhabit. Even if the end of geographical studies were only to obtain a knowledge of the external forms of the mineral and fluid masses which constitute the globe, it would still be necessary to take into account the element of life; for every plant, every animal, is a geographical agency, man a destructive, vegetables, and even wild beasts, restorative powers. The rushing waters sweep down earth from the upla

ases or diminishes the relative importance of the vegetable element in the geography of the country to which it is removed. Further, man sows that he may reap. The products of agricultural industry are not suffered to rot upon the ground, and thus raise it by an annual stratum of new mould. They are gathered, transported to greater or less distances, and after they have served the

bind the soil together and prevent its erosion by water. The broad-leaved annuals and perennials, too, shade the ground, and prevent the evaporation of moisture from its surface by wind and sun.[38] At a certain stage of growth, grass land is probably a more energetic radiator and condenser than even the forest, but this powerful action is exerted,

of Vegeta

in Europe and the United States are believed, and-if the testimony of Pliny and other ancient naturalists is to be depended upon-many of them are historically known, to have originated in the temperate climates of Asia. The wine grape has been thought to be truly indigenous only in the regions bordering on the eastern end of the Black Sea, where it now, partic

n to ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish civilization. In many instances, the chief supply of these articles comes from countries to which they are probably indigenous, and where they are still almost exclusively grown; but in many others, the

grown in the

the year ending on the day last mentioned, in round numbers, 171,000,000 bushels of wheat, 21,000,000 bushels of rye, 172,000,000 bushels of oats, 15,000,000 bushels of pease and beans, 16,000,000 bushels of barley, orchard fruits to the value of $20,000,000, 900,000 bushels of clov

lasses, all yielded by vegetables introduced into that country within two hundred years, and-with the exception of buckwheat, the origin of which is uncertain, and of cotton-all, directly or indirectly, from the East Indies; besides, from indigenous plants unknown to ancient agriculture, 830,000,000 bushels of Indian corn or maize, 429,000,000 pounds of tobacco, 110,000,000 bushels of pota

some small Indian clearings, it was all grown upon lands wrested from the forest by the European race within little more than two hundred years. The wants of Europe have introduced into the colonies of tropical America the sugar cane, the coffee plant, the orange and the lemon,[43] all of Ori

lants grow

d leguminous plants which the European colonists carried with them.[44] I wish I could believe, with some, that America is not alone responsible for the introduction of the filthy weed, tobacco, the use of which is the most vulgar and pernicious habit engrafted by the semi-barbarism of modern civilization upon

oduction of F

ac and the tulip. The Belgian Clusius about the same time introduced from the East the horse chestnut, which has since wandered to America. The weeping willows of Europe and the United States are said to have sprung from a slip received from Smyrna by the poet Pope, and planted by him in an English garden; and the Portuguese declare that the progenitor of all the European and American oranges was an Orient

in the year 1501, about sixty vegetable species, including some three or four known to grow elsewhere also. At the present time its flora numbers seven hundred and fifty species. Humboldt and Bonpland found, am

osition and condition, to that where its parent grew, as the soils of different fields artificially prepared for growing a particular vegetable are to each other. Accordingly, though every wild species affects a habitat of a particular character, it is found that, if accidentally or

place in the rustic materia medica of the Eastern States, spring up along the prairie paths but just opened by the caravan of the settler.[49] The hortus siccus of a botanist may accidentally sow seeds from the foot of the Himalayas on the plains that skirt the Alps; and it is a fact of very familiar observation, that exotics, transplanted to foreign climates suited to their growth, often escape from the flower garden and naturalize themselves among the spontaneous vegetation of the pastures. When the cases containing the artistic treasures of Thorvaldsen were opened in the court of the museum where they are deposited, the straw and grass employed in packing them were scattered upon the ground, and the next season there sprang up from the seeds no less than twenty-five species of plants belonging to the Roman c

fected by Transfer

nish colonies on the La Plata, acquired a gigantic stature, and propagated itself, in impenetrable thickets, over hundreds of leagues of the Pampas; and the Anacharis alsinastrum, a water plant not much inc

ltivated vegetables lose their vitality in two or three years, and can be transported safely to distant countries only with great precautions, the weeds that infest those vegetables, though not cared for by man, continue to acc

e tenacious of life, than the domesticated animals which most nearly resemble them. The savage fights on, after he has received half a dozen mortal wounds, the least of which would have instantly paralyzed the str

ed courser of the Arab; the strength of the European, as tested by the dynamometer, is greater than that of the New Zealander. But all these are instances of excessive development of particular capacities and faculties at the expense of general vital power. Expose untamed and

nt vegetables across the ocean has been made practicable, through the invention of Ward's airtight glass cases. It is by this means that large numbers of the trees which

ion of V

ds not now familiar to us as the growth of still living trees.[55] It is, however, said that the yew tree, Taxus baccata, formerly very common in England, Germany, and-as we are authorized to infer from Theophrastus-in Greece, has almost wholly disappeared from the latter country, and seems to be dying out in Germany. The wood of the yew surpasses that of any other European tree in closeness and fineness of grain, and it is well known for the elasticity which of old made it so great a favorite with the English archer. It is much in request among wood carvers and turners, and the demand for it explains, in part, its increasing scarcity. It is also worth remarking that no insect depends upon it for food or shelter, or aids in its fruc

ve district; and the late eminent agriculturist, Mr. Coke, is reported to have offered in vain a considerable reward for the detection of a weed in a large wheatfield on his estate in England. In these cases, however, there is no reason to suppose that

f Domest

experiments by which the identity of particular wild and cultivated vegetables has been thought to be established. It is confidently affirmed that maize and the potato-which we must suppose to have been first cultivated at a much later period than the breadstuffs and most other esculent vegetables of Europe and the East-are found wild and self-propagating in Spanish America, though in forms not recognizable by the common observer as identical with the familiar corn and tuber of

, a question of evidence. The only satisfactory proof that a given wild plant is identical with a given garden or field vegetable, is the test of experiment, the actual growing of the one from the seed of the other, or the conversion of the one into the other by transplantation and change of conditions. It is hardly contended that any of the cereals or other plants important as human aliment, or as objects of agricultural industry, exist and pro

Geological and G

the skeletons of quadrupeds, sometimes lying loose in the earth, sometimes cemented together into an osseous breccia by a calcareous deposit or other binding material. These remains of large animals, though found in comparatively late formations, generally belong to extinct species, and their modern congeners or representatives do not exist in sufficient numbers to be of sensible importance in geology or in geography by the mere mass of their skeletons.[59] But the vegetable products found with them, and, in rare cases, in the stomachs of some of them, are those of yet extant plants; and besides this evidence, the recent discovery of works of human art, deposited in juxtapo

f Southern Africa-and the slaughter of which by thousands is the source of a ferocious pleasure and a brutal triumph to professedly civilized hunters-if the herds of the American bison, which are numbered by hundreds of thousands, do not produce visible changes in

plant from the voracity of the quadruped, or of the extinction of the quadruped from the scarcity of the plant. In diet and natural wants the bison resembles the ox, the ibex and the chamois assimilate themselves to the goat and the sheep; but while the wild animal does not appear to be a destructive agency in the garden of nature, his domestic congeners are eminently so. This is partly from the change of habits resulting from domestication and association with man, partly from the fact that the number of reclaimed animals is not determined by the natural relation of demand and spontaneous supply which regulates the multiplication of wild creatures, but by the convenience of man, wh

rupeds in the

ly gregarious in habits, and sufficiently multiplied in numbers, to form really large herds, is the bison, or, as he is commonly called in America, the buffalo; and this animal is confined to the prairie region of the Mississippi basin and Northern Mexico. The engineers sent out to survey railroad routes to the Pacific estimated the number of a single herd of bisons seen within the last ten years on the great plains near the Upper Missouri, at not less than 200,000, and yet the range occupied by this animal is now very much smaller in area than it was when the whites first established themselves on the prairies.[65] But it must be remarked that the American buffalo is a migratory animal, and that, at the season of his annual journeys, the whole stock of a vast extent of pasture ground is collected into a single army, which

with their domestic successors, that they required a much less supply of vegetable food, and consequently were far less import

nsfer of Domes

The Bactrian camel was certainly brought from Asia Minor to the Northern shores of the Black Sea, by the Goths, in the third or fourth century.[67] The Arabian single-humped camel, or dromedary, has been carried to the Canary Islands, partially introduced into Australia, Greece, Spain, and even Tuscany, experimented upon to little purpose in Venezuela, and finally imported by the American Government into Texas and New Mexico, where it finds the climate and the vegetable products best suited to its wants, and promises to become a very useful agent in the promotion of the special civilization for which those regions are adapted. America had no domestic quadruped but a species of dog, the lama tribe, and, to a certain extent, the bison or buffalo.[68] Of course, it owes the horse, the ass, the o

ion of Q

us quadruped with more abundant food. The same animal became again more numerous in Poland after the general disarming of the rural population by the Russian Government. On the other hand, when the hunters pursue the wolf, the graminivorous wild quadrupeds increase, and thus in turn promote the multiplication of their great four-footed destroyer by augmenting the supply of his nourishment. So long as the fur of the beaver was extensively employed as a material for fine hats, it bore a very high price, and the chase of this quadruped was so keen that naturalists feared its speedy extinction. When

reat apparent antiquity, are found antlers which testify to the former existence of a stag much larger than any extant European species. The lion is believed to have inhabited Asia Minor and Syria, and probably Greece and Sicily also, long after the commencement of the historical period, and he is even said to have been not yet extinct in the first-named two of these countr

wghtie Sigfrid a

uroxen and a grim a

w exists only in the Russian imperial forest of Bialowitz, where about a thousand are still preserved, and in some great menageries, as for example that at Sch?nbrunn, near Vienna, which, in 1852, had four specimens. The eland, which is closely allied to the American wapiti, if not specifically the same animal

rds in the U

fall greatly short of the wild pigeon in multitude, and it is hardly probable that the flocks of domestic geese and ducks are as numerous as once were those of their wild congeners. The pigeon, indeed, seems to have multiplied immensely, for some years after the first clearings in the woods, because the settlers warred unsparingly upon the hawk, while the crops of grain and other vegetable growths increased the supply of food within the reach of the young birds, at the age when their power of flight is not

sumers of Seeds, and as

effectually than those of domesticated plants. The cereal grains are completely digested when consumed by birds, but the germ of the smaller stone fruits and of very many other wild vegetables is uninjured, perhaps even stimulated to more vigorous growth, by the natural chemistry of the bird's stomach. The power of flight and the restless habits of the bird enable it to transport heavy seeds to far greater distances than they could be carried by the wind. A swift-winged bird may drop cherry stones a thousand miles from the tree they grow on; a hawk, in tearing a pigeon, may scatter from its crop the still fresh rice it had swallowed at a distance of ten degrees of lat

lished by the examination of the stomachs of great numbers of birds in Europe and New England, at different seasons of the year, that it is no longer open to doubt, and it appears highly probable that even the species which consume more or less grain generally make amends, by destroying insects whose ravages would have been still more injurious.[74] On this subject, we have much other evidence besides that derived from dissection. Direct observation has shown, in many instan

hout seeing and without foreseeing, blind to the great harmony which is never broken with impunity, he has everywhere demanded or approved laws for the extermination of that necessary ally of his toil-the insectivorous bird. And the insect has well avenged the bird. It has become necessary to revoke in haste the proscription. In the Isle of Bourbon, for instance, a price was set on the head of the martin; it disappeared, and the grasshoppers took possession of the island, devouring, withering, scorching with a biting drought all that they did not consume. In North America it has

scription; their larv?, infinitely multiplied, carried on their subterranean labors with such success, that a meadow was shown me, the surface of which was co

nd Extirpati

t, 1789, soon after the National Assembly had declared the chase free, thus complains of the annoyance he experienced from the use made by the peasantry of their newly won liberty. "One would think that every rusty firelock in all Provence was at work in the indiscriminate destruction of all the birds. The wadding buzzed by my ears, or fell into my carriage, five or six times in th

classes in that country against birds are, in some degree, at least, due to a legislation, which, by restricting the chase of all game worth killing, drives the unprivileged sportsman to indemnify himself by slaughtering all wild life which is not reserved for the amusement of his b

have just mentioned to stimulate still further the destructive passions of the fowler. In the Tuscan province of Grosseto

tender, defenceless, and helpless. Every cold rain, every violent wind, every hailstorm during the breeding season, destroys hundreds of nestlings, and the parent often perishes with her progeny while brooding over it in the vain effort to protect it.[79] The great proportional numbers of birds, their migratory habits, and the ease with which they may escape most dangers that beset them, would seem to secure them from extirpation, and even from very

by ancient or modern naturalists are known to have become absolutely extinct, though there are some cases in which they are ascertained to have utterly disappeared from the face of the earth in very recent times. The most familiar instances are those of the dodo, a large bird peculiar to the Mauritius or Isle of France, exterminated about the year 1690, and now known only by two or three fragments of skeletons, and the solitary, which inhabited the islands of Bourbon and Rodriguez, but has not been seen for more than a century. A parrot and some other birds of the Norfolk Island group are said to have

ich. The condition in which the bones of these birds have been found and the traditions of the natives concur to prove that, though the aborigines had probably extirpated them before the discovery of New Zealand by the whites, they still existed at a comparatively late period. The same remarks apply

in others. The cappercailzie, Tetrao urogallus, the finest of the grouse family, formerly abundant in Scotland, had become extinct in Great Britain, but has been reintroduced from Sweden.[81] The ostrich is mentioned by all the o

stalls of the London poulterer. Kohl[82] informs us that on the coasts of the North Sea, twenty thousand wild ducks are usually taken in the course of the season in a single decoy, and sent to the large maritime towns for sale. The statistics of the great European cities show a prodigious consumption of game birds, but the official returns fall far below the truth, because they do not include the rural

only in the same sense in which all waste of productive capital is an evil. If it were possible to confine the consumption of game fowl to a number equal to the annual increase, the world would be a gainer, but not to the same extent as it would be by checking the wanton sacrifice of millions of the sm

ction o

ntly upon the insects it harbors. The vulture, the crow, and other winged scavengers, follow the march of armies as regularly as the wolf. Birds accompany ships on long voyages, for the sake of the offal which is thrown overboard, and, in such cases, it might often happen that they would breed and become naturalized in countries where they had been unknown before

ssary ingredient in the ink I am writing with, and from my windows I recognize the grain of the kermes and the cochineal in the gay habiliments of the holiday groups beneath them. But agriculture, too, is indebted to the insect and the worm. The ancients, according to Pliny, were accustomed to hang branches of the wild fig upon the domestic tree, in order that the insects which frequented the former might hasten the ripening of the cultivated fig by their punctur

ld which he had deeply drained, after long-previous shallow drainage, he found that the worms had greatly increased in number, and that their bores descended quite to the level of the pipes. Many worm bores were large enough to receive the little finger. Mr. Henry Handley had informed him of a piece of land near the sea in Lincolnshire, over which the sea had broken and killed all the worms-the field remained sterile until the worms again inhabited

traced by Mr. C. Darwin, of Down, Kent, who has shown that in a few years they have actually elevated the surface of fields by a large la

eir excreta during life, and by the decomposition of their remains when they die. The manure thus furnished is as valuable as the like amount of similar animal products derived from higher organisms, and when we consi

, that some six thousand species of orchids are absolutely dependent upon the agency of insects for their fertilization. That is to say, were those plants unvisited by insects, they would all rapidly disappear." What is true of the orchids is more or less true of many other vegetable families. We do not know the limits of this agency, and many of the insects habitually regarded as unqualified pests, may directly or indirectly perform functions as important to the most valuable plants as the services rendered by certain tribes to the orchids. I say directly or indirectly, because, besides the other arrangements of nature for checking the undue multiplication of particular species,

us life, the law of self-preservation requires us to restore the equilibrium, by either directly returning the weight abstracted from one scale, or removing a cor

s well as in natural waters. A few years ago, the water of the Cochituate aqueduct at Boston became so offensive in smell and taste as to be quite unfit for use. Scientific investigation found the cause in the too scru

tion of

ceded it. For many years after the colonization of the United States, few or none of the insects which attack wheat in its different stages of growth, were known in America. During the Revolutionary war, the Hessian fly, Cecidomyia destructor, made its appearance, and it was so called because it was first observed in the year when the Hessian troops were brought over, and was popularly supposed to have been accidentally imported by those unwelcome strangers. Other destroyers of cereal grains have since found their way across the Atlantic, and a noxious European aphis has first attacked the American wheatfields within the last four or five years. Unhappily, in these cases of migration, the natural corrective of excessive multiplication, the parasitic or voracious enemy of the noxious insect, does not always accompany the wanderings of its prey, and the bane long precedes the antidote. Hence, in the United States, the ravages of imported insects injurious to cultivated crops, not being checked by the counteracting influences which nature had provide

ca with promising success. The cochineal, long regularly bred in aboriginal America, has been transplanted to Spain, and both the kermes insect and the cantharides have been transferred to other climates than their own. The honey bee must be ranked next to the silkworm in economical importance.[89] This useful creature was carried to the United S

parasites with them, and the traffic of commercial countries, which exchange their products with every zone and every stage of social existence, cannot fail to tr

ose wooden walls it mines to almost every part of the globe. The termite, or white ant, is said to have been brought to Rochefort by the commerce of that port a hundred years ago.[92] This creature is more injurious to wooden structures and implements than any other known insect. It eats out almost the entire substance of the wood, leaving only thin partitions between the galleries it excavates in it; but as it never gnaws through the surface to the air, a stick of timber may be almost wholl

nce, bury the small animals in which they lay their eggs, and thereby prevent the escape of the gases disengaged by putrefaction. The prodigious rapidity of development in insect life, the great numbers of the individuals in many species, and the voracity of most of them while in th

tion of

t in the wooded regions where those insects abound.[94] Earlier in the year the trout feeds on the larv? of the May fly, which is itself very destructive to the spawn of the salmon, and hence, by a sort of house-that-Jack-built, the destruction of the mosquito, that feeds the trout that preys on the May fly that destroys the eggs that hatch the salmon that pam

haps, needless to say that the injury these birds do the forest is imaginary. They do not cut holes in the trunk of the tree to prepare a lodgment for a future colony of boring larv?, but to extract the worm which has already begun his mining labors. Hence these birds are not found where the forester removes trees as fast as they become fit habitations for such insects. In clearing new lands in the United States, dead trees, especially of the spike-leaved kinds, too much decayed to serve for timber, and which, in that state, are worth little for fuel, are often allowed to stand until they fall of themselves. Such stubs, as they are popularly called, are filled with borers, and often deeply cut by the woodpeckers, whose strong bills enable them to penetrate to the very

that constitute his ordinary diet, and the curious ai-ai, a climbing quadruped of Madagascar-of which I believe only a single specimen, secured by Mr. Sandwith, has y

til

surprise in the winged state upon walls and trees, and consume as egg, worm, and chrysalis, in their earlier metamorphoses. The serpents feed much upon insects, as well as upon mice, moles, and small reptiles, including also other snakes. The disgust and fear with which the serpent is so universally regarded expose him to constant persecution by man, and perhaps no other animal is so relentlessly sacrificed by him. In temperate climates, snakes are consumed by scarcely any beast or bird of prey except the stork, and they have few dangerous enem

ction

ion in the abundance of the larger fish employed for food or pursued for products useful in the arts is familiar, and when we consider how the vegetable and animal life on which they feed must be affected by the reduction of their numbers, it is easy to see that their destruction may involve considerable modifications in many of the material arrangements of nature. The whale does not appear to have been an object of pursuit by the ancients, for any purpose, nor do we know when the whale fishery first commenced.[97] It was, however, very actively prosecuted in the Middle Ages, and the Biscayan

by an individual, and of course we can form no estimate of the total amount of animal matter withdrawn by them, in a given period, from the waters of the sea. It is certain, however, that it must have been enormous when they were more abundant, and that it is still very considerable. A very few years since, the United States had more than six hundred whaling ships constantly employed in the Pacific, and the product of the American whale fishery for the year ending June 1st, 1860, was seven millions and a half of dollars.[99] The mere bulk of the whales destroyed in a single year by the American

an and its coasts discloses to unscientific observation-nowhere alludes to this most beautiful and striking of maritime wonders. In the passage just referred to, I have endeavored to explain the silence of ancient writers with respect to this as well as other remarkable phenomena on psychological grounds; but is it no

had he not been as hostile to them also as to their persecutors. We have little evidence that any fish employed as human food has naturally multiplied in modern times, while all the more valuable tribes have been immensely reduced in numbers.[101] This reduction must have affected the more voracious species not used as food by man, and accordingly the shark, and other fish of similar habits, though not objects of systematic pursuit, are now comparatively rare in many waters where they formerl

n and Breed

t, has peopled some European, and it is said American streams with this species. Canals of navigation and irrigation interchange the fish of lakes and rivers widely separated by natural barriers, as well as the plants which drop their seeds into the waters. The Erie Canal, as measured by its own channel, has a length of about three hundred and sixty miles, and it has ascending and descending locks in both directions. By this route, the fresh-water fish of the Hudson and the Upper Lakes, and some of the indigenous vegetables of these respective basins, have intermixed, and the fauna and flora of the two region

the smelt among others, are said to have been naturalized in fresh water, and some naturalists have argued from the character of the fish of Lake Baikal, and especially from the existence of the seal in that locality, that all its inhabitants were originally marine species, and have changed their habits with the gradual conversion of the saline waters of the lake-once, as is assumed

d to as proofs of an elevation of the coast by geological causes; but they are now ascertained to have been derived from oysters, consumed in the course of long ages by the inhabitants of Indian towns. The planting of a bed of oysters in a new locality might, very probably, lead, in time, to the formation of a bank, which, in connection with other deposits, might perceptibly affect the line of a coast, or, by changing the course of marine currents, or the outlet of a river, produce geo

ysical resources, governments can hope to confer upon their subjects. The rivers, lakes, and seacoasts once restocked, and protected by law from exhaustion by taking fish at improper seasons, by destructive methods, and in extravagant quantities, would continue indefinitely to furnish a very large supply of most healthful food, which, unlike all domestic and agricultural products, would spontaneously renew itself and cost nothing but the taking. There are many sterile or wornout soils in Europe so situated that they might, at no very formidable cost, be converted into permanent lakes, which would serve not only as reservoirs to retain the water of winter rains and snow, a

n of Aquat

t thousand pounds, and appears to have been confined exclusively to the islands and coasts in the neighborhood of Bering's Strait. Its flesh was very palatable, and the localities it frequented were easily accessible from the Russian establishments in Kamtschatka. As soon as its existence and character, and the abundance of fur animals in the same waters, were made known to the occupants of those posts by the return of the survivors of Bering's expedition, so active a chase was commenced against the amphibia of that region,

preyed upon by them. I have been assured by the keeper of several tamed seals that, if supplied at frequent intervals, each seal would devour not less than fourteen pounds of fish, or about a quarter of his own weight, in a day.[104] A very in

do not wastefully destroy what they cannot consume. Man, on the contrary, angles to-day that he may dine to-morrow; he takes and dries millions of fish on the banks of Newfoundland, that the fervent Catholic of the shores of the Mediterranean may have wherewithal to satisfy the cravings of the stomach during next year's Lent, without imperilling

d prepared by man the flavor of those which are nourished at the table of nature, and the trout of the artificial ponds in Germany and Switzerland are so inferior to the brook fish of the same species and climate, that it is hard to believe them identical. The superior sapidity of the American trout to the European species, which is familiar to every one

onsequence of clearing the woods, the changes already described as thereby produced in the beds and currents of rivers, are in progress, the spawning grounds of fish are exposed from year to year to a succession of mechanical disturbances; the temperature of the water is higher in summer, colder in winter, than when it was shaded and protected by wood; the smaller organisms, which formed the sustenance of the young fry, disappear or are reduced in numbers, and new enemies are added to the old foes that preyed upon them; the increased turbidness of the water in the annual inundatio

e Org

servation assure us that the chalk beds of England and of France, the coral reefs of marine waters in warm climates, vast calcareous and silicious deposits in the sea and in many fresh-water ponds, the common polishing earths and slates, and many species of apparently dense and solid rock, are the work of the humble organisms of which I speak, often, indeed, of animalcul? so small as to become visible only by the aid of lenses magnifying a hundred times the linear measures. It is popularly supposed that animalcul?, or what are commonly embraced under the vague name of infusoria, inhabit the water alone, but the atmospheric dust transported by every wind and deposited by every calm is full of microscopic life or of its relics. The soil on which the city of Berlin stands, co

perations tend to disturb the natural arrangements of this element, to increase or to diminish the special adaptation of every medium in which it lives to the particular orders of being inhabited by it. The conversion of woodland into pasturage, of pasture into plough land, of swamp or of shallow sea into dry

ure, as we do upon objects of bargain and sale in our trafficking one with another. But there are still some cases where the little we know of a life, whose workings are invisible to the naked eye, suggests the possibility of advantageously directing the efforts of troops of artisans that we cannot see. Upon coasts occupied by the corallines, the reef-building animalcule does not work near the mouth of rivers. Hence the change of the outlet of a stream, often a very easy matter, may promote the construction of a barrier to coast navigatio

The reef builders are leisurely architects, but the precious coral is formed so rapidly that the beds may be refished advantageously as often as once in ten years.[110] It does not seem impossible that this coral might be transplanted to t

diatomace? might perhaps help us to profit directly by the productivity of this organism, and, at the same time, disclose secrets of nature capable of being turned to valuable account in dealing with silicious rocks, and the metal which is the base of them. Our acquaintance with the obscure and infinitesimal life of which I have now been treating is very recent, and still very imperfe

can measure with his outstretched arms. To a being who instinctively finds the standard of all magnitudes in his own material frame, all objects exceeding his own dimensions are absolutely great, all falling short of them absolutely small. Hence we habitually regard the whale and the elephant as essentially large and therefore important creatures, the animalcule as an essentially small and therefore unimportant organism. But no geological formation owes its origin to the labors or the remains of the huge mammal, while the animalcule composes, or has furnished, the substance of strata thousands of feet in