Man and Nature Part 25

[26] 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 Mississippi 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 inhabited 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 spontaneous nature.

[27] There is a possible--but only a possible--exception in the case of the American bison. See note on that subject in chap. iii, _post_.

[28] Whatever may be thought of the modification of organic species by natural selection, there is certainly no evidence that animals have exerted upon any form of life an influence a.n.a.logous to that of domestication upon plants, quadrupeds, and birds reared artificially by man; and this is as true of unforeseen as of purposely effected improvements accomplished by voluntary selection of breeding animals.

[29] ----"And it may be remarked that, as the world has pa.s.sed through these several stages of strife to produce a Christendom, so by relaxing in the enterprises it has learnt, does it tend downwards, through inverted steps, to wildness and the waste again. Let a people give up their contest with moral evil; disregard the injustice, the ignorance, the greediness, that may prevail among them, and part more and more with the Christian element of their civilization; and in declining this battle with sin, they will inevitably get embroiled with men. Threats of war and revolution punish their unfaithfulness; and if then, instead of retracing their steps, they yield again, and are driven before the storm, the very arts they had created, the structures they had raised, the usages they had established, are swept away; 'in that very day their thoughts perish.' The portion they had reclaimed from the young earth's ruggedness is lost; and failing to stand fast against man, they finally get embroiled with nature, and are thrust down beneath her ever-living hand."--MARTINEAU'S _Sermon_, "_The Good Soldier of Jesus Christ_."

[30] The dependence of man upon the aid of spontaneous nature, in his most arduous material works, is curiously ill.u.s.trated by the fact that one of the most serious difficulties to be encountered in executing the proposed gigantic scheme of draining the Zuiderzee in Holland, is that of procuring brushwood for the fascines to be employed in the embankments. See DIGGELEN'S pamphlet, "_Groote Werken in Nederland_."

[31] In heavy storms, the force of the waves as they strike against a sea wall is from one and a half to two tons to the square foot, and Stevenson, in one instance at Skerryvore, found this force equal to three tons per foot.

The seaward front of the breakwater at Cherbourg exposes a surface of about 2,500,000 square feet. In rough weather the waves beat against this whole face, though at the depth of twenty-two yards, which is the height of the breakwater, they exert a very much less violent motive force than at and near the surface of the sea, because this force diminishes in geometrical, as the distance below the surface increases in arithmetical proportion. The shock of the waves is received several thousand times in the course of twenty-four hours, and hence the sum of impulse which the breakwater resists in one stormy day amounts to many thousands of millions of tons. The breakwater is entirely an artificial construction. If then man could acc.u.mulate and control the forces which he is able effectually to resist, he might be said to be, physically speaking, omnipotent.

[32] Some well known experiments show that it is quite possible to acc.u.mulate the solar heat by a simple apparatus, and thus to obtain a temperature which might be economically important even in the climate of Switzerland. Saussure, by receiving the sun's rays in a nest of boxes blackened within and covered with gla.s.s, raised a thermometer enclosed in the inner box to the boiling point; and under the more powerful sun of the cape of Good Hope, Sir John Herschel cooked the materials for a family dinner by a similar process, using, however, but a single box, surrounded with dry sand and covered with two gla.s.ses. Why should not so easy a method of economizing fuel be resorted to in Italy, and even in more northerly climates?

The unfortunate John Davidson records in his journal that he saved fuel in Morocco by exposing his teakettle to the sun on the roof of his house, where the water rose to the temperature of one hundred and forty degrees, and, of course, needed little fire to bring it to boil. But this was the direct and simple, not the acc.u.mulated heat of the sun.

[33] In the successive stages of social progress, the most destructive periods of human action upon nature are the pastoral condition, and that of incipient stationary civilization, or, in the newly discovered countries of modern geography, the colonial, which corresponds to the era of early civilization in older lands. In more advanced states of culture, conservative influences make themselves felt; and if highly civilized communities do not always restore the works of nature, they at least use a less wasteful expenditure than their predecessors in consuming them.

[34] The character of geological formation is an element of very great importance in determining the amount of erosion produced by running water, and, of course, in measuring the consequences of clearing off the forests. The soil of the French Alps yields very readily to the force of currents, and the declivities of the northern Apennines are covered with earth which becomes itself a fluid when saturated with water. Hence the erosion of such surfaces is vastly greater than on many other mountains of equal steepness of inclination. This point is fully considered by the authors referred to in chap. iii, _post_.

[35] The Travels of Dr. Dwight, president of Yale College, which embody the results of his personal observations, and of his inquiries among the early settlers, in his vacation excursions in the Northern States of the American Union, though presenting few instrumental measurements or tabulated results, are of value for the powers of observation they exhibit, and for the sound common sense with which many natural phenomena, such for instance as the formation of the river meadows, called "intervales," in New England, are explained. They present a true and interesting picture of physical conditions, many of which have long ceased to exist in the theatre of his researches, and of which few other records are extant.

[36] The general law of temperature is that it decreases as we ascend.

But, in hilly regions, the law is reversed in cold, still weather, the cold air descending, by reason of its greater gravity, into the valleys.

If there be wind enough, however, to produce a disturbance and intermixture of higher and lower atmospheric strata, this exception to the general law does not take place. These facts have long been familiar to the common people of Switzerland and of New England, but their importance has not been sufficiently taken into account in the discussion of meteorological observations. The descent of the cold air and the rise of the warm affect the relative temperatures of hills and valleys to a much greater extent than has been usually supposed. A gentleman well known to me kept a thermometrical record for nearly half a century, in a New England country town, at an elevation of at least 1,500 feet above the sea. During these years his thermometer never fell lower than 26 Fahrenheit, while at the shire town of the county, situated in a basin one thousand feet lower, and ten miles distant, as well as at other points in similar positions, the mercury froze several times in the same period.

[37] Railroad surveys must be received with great caution where any motive exists for _cooking_ them. Capitalists are shy of investments in roads with steep grades, and of course it is important to make a fair show of facilities in obtaining funds for new routes. Joint-stock companies have no souls; their managers, in general, no consciences.

Cases can be cited where engineers and directors of railroads, with long grades above one hundred feet to the mile, have regularly sworn in their annual reports, for years in succession, that there were no grades upon their routes exceeding half that elevation. In fact, every person conversant with the history of these enterprises knows that in their public statements falsehood is the rule, truth the exception.

What I am about to remark is not exactly relevant to my subject; but it is hard to "get the floor" in the world's great debating society, and when a speaker who has anything to say once finds access to the public ear, he must make the most of his opportunity, without inquiring too nicely whether his observations are "in order." I shall harm no honest man by endeavoring, as I have often done elsewhere, to excite the attention of thinking and conscientious men to the dangers which threaten the great moral and even political interests of Christendom, from the unscrupulousness of the private a.s.sociations that now control the monetary affairs, and regulate the transit of persons and property, in almost every civilized country. More than one American State is literally governed by unprincipled corporations, which not only defy the legislative power, but have, too often, corrupted even the administration of justice. Similar evils have become almost equally rife in England, and on the Continent; and I believe the decay of commercial morality, and indeed of the sense of all higher obligations than those of a pecuniary nature, on both sides of the Atlantic, is to be ascribed more to the influence of joint-stock banks and manufacturing and railway companies, to the workings, in short, of what is called the principle of "a.s.sociate action," than to any other one cause of demoralization.

The apophthegm, "the world is governed too much," though unhappily too truly spoken of many countries--and perhaps, in some aspects, true of all--has done much mischief whenever it has been too unconditionally accepted as a political axiom. The popular apprehension of being over-governed, and, I am afraid, more emphatically the fear of being over-taxed, has had much to do with the general abandonment of certain governmental duties by the ruling powers of most modern states. It is theoretically the duty of government to provide all those public facilities of intercommunication and commerce, which are essential to the prosperity of civilized commonwealths, but which individual means are inadequate to furnish, and for the due administration of which individual guaranties are insufficient. Hence public roads, ca.n.a.ls, railroads, postal communications, the circulating medium of exchange, whether metallic or representative, armies, navies, being all matters in which the nation at large has a vastly deeper interest than any private a.s.sociation can have, ought legitimately to be constructed and provided only by that which is the visible personification and embodiment of the nation, namely, its legislative head. No doubt the organization and management of these inst.i.tutions by government are liable, as are all things human, to great abuses. The multiplication of public placeholders, which they imply, is a serious evil. But the corruption thus engendered, foul as it is, does not strike so deep as the rottenness of private corporations; and official rank, position, and duty have, in practice, proved better securities for fidelity and pecuniary integrity in the conduct of the interests in question, than the suretyships of private corporate agents, whose bondsmen so often fail or abscond before their princ.i.p.al is detected.

Many theoretical statesmen have thought that voluntary a.s.sociations for strictly pecuniary and industrial purposes, and for the construction and control of public works, might furnish, in democratic countries, a compensation for the small and doubtful advantages, and at the same time secure an exemption from the great and certain evils, of aristocratic inst.i.tutions. The example of the American States shows that private corporations--whose rule of action is the interest of the a.s.sociation, not the conscience of the individual--though composed of ultra-democratic elements, may become most dangerous enemies to rational liberty, to the moral interests of the commonwealth, to the purity of legislation and of judicial action, and to the sacredness of private rights.

[38] It is impossible to say how far the abstraction of water from the earth by broad-leaved field and garden plants--such as maize, the gourd family, the cabbage, &c.--is compensated by the condensation of dew, which sometimes pours from them in a stream, by the exhalation of aqueous vapor from their leaves, which is directly absorbed by the ground, and by the shelter they afford the soil from sun and wind, thus preventing evaporation. American farmers often say that after the leaves of Indian corn are large enough to "shade the ground," there is little danger that the plants will suffer from drought; but it is probable that the comparative security of the fields from this evil is in part due to the fact that, at this period of growth, the roots penetrate down to a permanently humid stratum of soil, and draw from it the moisture they require. Stirring the ground between the rows of maize with a light harrow or cultivator, in very dry seasons, is often recommended as a preventive of injury by drought. It would seem, indeed, that loosening and turning over the surface earth might aggravate the evil by promoting the evaporation of the little remaining moisture; but the practice is founded partly on the belief that the hygroscopicity of the soil is increased by it to such a degree that it gains more by absorption than it loses by evaporation, and partly on the doctrine that to admit air to the rootlets, or at least to the earth near them, is to supply directly elements of vegetable growth.

[39] The vine-wood planks of the ancient great door of the cathedral at Ravenna, which measured thirteen feet in length by a foot and a quarter in width, are traditionally said to have been brought from the Black Sea, by way of Constantinople, about the eleventh or twelfth century. No vines of such dimensions are now found in any other part of the East, and, though I have taken some pains on the subject, I never found in Syria or in Turkey a vine stock exceeding six inches in diameter, bark excluded.

[40] The Northmen who--as I think it has been indisputably established by Professor Rafn of Copenhagen--visited the coast of Ma.s.sachusetts about the year 1000, found grapes growing there in profusion, and the vine still flourishes in great variety and abundance in the southeastern counties of that State. The townships in the vicinity of the Dighton rock, supposed by many--with whom, however, I am sorry I cannot agree--to bear a Scandinavian inscription, abound in wild vines, and I have never seen a region which produced them so freely. I have no doubt that the cultivation of the grape will become, at no distant day, one of the most important branches of rural industry in that district.

[41] _Les etats Unis d'Amerique en 1863_, p. 360. By "improved" land, in the reports on the census of the United States, is meant "cleared land used for grazing, gra.s.s, or tillage, or which is now fallow, connected with or belonging to a farm."--_Instructions to Marshals and a.s.sistants, Census of 1850_, schedule 4, ---- 2, 3.

[42] Cotton, though cultivated in Asia and Africa from the remotest antiquity, and known as a rare and costly product to the Latins and the Greeks, was not used by them to any considerable extent, nor did it enter into their commerce as a regular article of importation. The early voyagers found it in common use in the West Indies and in the provinces first colonized by the Spaniards; but it was introduced into the territory of the United States by European settlers, and did not become of any importance until after the Revolution. Cotton seed was sown in Virginia as early as 1621, but was not cultivated with a view to profit for more than a century afterward. Sea-island cotton was first grown on the coast of Georgia in 1786, the seed having been brought from the Bahamas, where it had been introduced from Anguilla.--BIGELOW, _Les etats Unis en 1863_, p. 370.

[43] The sugar cane was introduced by the Arabs into Sicily and Spain as early as the ninth century, and though it is now scarcely grown in those localities, I am not aware of any reason to doubt that its cultivation might be revived with advantage. From Spain it was carried to the West Indies, though different varieties have since been introduced into those islands from other sources. Tea is now cultivated with a certain success in Brazil, and promises to become an important crop in the Southern States of the American Union. The lemon is, I think, readily recognizable, by Pliny's description, as known to the ancients, but it does not satisfactorily appear that they were acquainted with the orange.

[44] John Smith mentions, in his _Historie of Virginia_, 1624, pease and beans as having been cultivated by the natives before the arrival of the whites, and there is no doubt, I believe, that the pumpkin and several other cucurbitaceous plants are of American origin; but most, if not all the varieties of pease, beans, and other pod fruits now grown in American gardens, are from European and other foreign seed. See _Appendix_, No, 8.

[45] There are some usages of polite society which are inherently low in themselves, and debasing in their influence and tendency, and which no custom or fashion can make respectable or fit to be followed by self-respecting persons. It is essentially vulgar to smoke or chew tobacco, and especially to take snuff; it is unbecoming a gentleman, to perform the duties of his coachman; it is indelicate in a lady to wear in the street skirts so long that she cannot walk without grossly soiling them. Not that all these things are not practised by persons justly regarded as gentlemen and ladies; but the same individuals would be, and feel themselves to be, much more emphatically gentlemen and ladies, if they abstained from them.

[46] The name _portogallo_, so generally applied to the orange in Italy, seems to favor this claim. The orange, however, was known in Europe before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and, therefore, before the establishment of direct relations between Portugal and the East.

A correspondent of the _Athenaeum_, in describing the newly excavated villa, which has been named Livia's Villa, near the Porta del Popolo at Rome, states that: "The walls of one of the rooms are, singularly enough, decorated with landscape paintings, a grove of palm and _orange_ trees, with fruits and birds on the branches--the colors all as fresh and lively as if painted yesterday." The writer remarks on the character of this decoration as something very unusual in Roman architecture; and if the trees in question are really orange, and not lemon trees, this circ.u.mstance may throw some doubt on the antiquity of the painting. If, on the other hand, it proves really ancient, it shows that the orange was known to the Roman painters, if not gardeners. The landscape may perhaps represent Oriental, not European scenery. The accessories of the picture would probably determine that question.--_Athenaeum_, No. 1859, June 13, 1863.

MuLLER, _Das Buch der Pflanzenwelt_, p. 86, a.s.serts that in 1802 the ancestor of all the mulberries in France, planted in 1500, was still standing in a garden in the village of Allan-Montelimart.

[47] The vegetables which, so far as we know their history, seem to have been longest the objects of human care, can, by painstaking industry, be made to grow under a great variety of circ.u.mstances, and some of them--the vine for instance--prosper nearly equally well, when planted and tended, on soils of almost any geological character; but their seeds vegetate only in artificially prepared ground, they have little self-sustaining power, and they soon perish when the nursing hand of man is withdrawn from them. In range of climate, wild plants are much more limited than domestic, but much less so with regard to the state of the soil in which they germinate and grow. See _Appendix_, No. 9.

Dr. Dwight remarks that the seeds of American forest trees will not vegetate when dropped on gra.s.sland. This is one of the very few errors of personal observation to be found in that author's writings. There are seasons, indeed, when few tree seeds germinate in the meadows and the pastures, and years favorable to one species are not always propitious to another; but there is no American forest tree known to me which does not readily propagate itself by seed in the thickest greensward, if its germs are not disturbed by man or animals.

[48] Some years ago I made a collection of weeds in the wheatfields of Upper Egypt, and another in the gardens on the Bosphorus. Nearly all the plants were identical with those which grow under the same conditions in New England. I do not remember to have seen in America the scarlet wild poppy so common in European grainfields. I have heard, however, that it has lately crossed the Atlantic, and I am not sorry for it. With our abundant harvests of wheat, we can well afford to pay now and then a loaf of bread for the cheerful radiance of this brilliant flower.

[49] Josselyn, who wrote about fifty years after the foundation of the first British colony in New England, says that the settlers at Plymouth had observed more than twenty English plants springing up spontaneously near their improvements.

Every country has many plants not now, if ever, made use of by man, and therefore not designedly propagated by him, but which cl.u.s.ter around his dwelling, and continue to grow luxuriantly on the ruins of his rural habitation after he has abandoned it. The site of a cottage, the very foundation stones of which have been carried off, may often be recognized, years afterward, by the rank weeds which cover it, though no others of the same species are found for miles.

"Mediaeval Catholicism," says Vaupell, "brought us the red horsehoof--whose reddish-brown flower buds shoot up from the ground when the snow melts, and are followed by the large leaves--_laegekulsukker_ and snake-root, which grow only where there were convents and other dwellings in the Middle Ages."--_Bogens Indvandring i de Danske Skove_, pp. 1, 2.

[50] VAUPELL, _Bogens Indvandring i de Danske Skove_, p. 2.

[51] It is, I believe, nearly certain that the Turks inflicted tobacco upon Hungary, and probable that they in some measure compensated the injury by introducing maize also, which, as well as tobacco, has been claimed as Hungarian by patriotic Magyars.

[52] Accidents sometimes limit, as well as promote, the propagation of foreign vegetables in countries new to them. The Lombardy poplar is a di[oe]cious tree, and is very easily grown from cuttings. In most of the countries into which it has been introduced the cuttings have been taken from the male, and as, consequently, males only have grown from them, the poplar does not produce seed in those regions. This is a fortunate circ.u.mstance, for otherwise this most worthless and least ornamental of trees would spread with a rapidity that would make it an annoyance to the agriculturist. See _Appendix_, No. 10.

[53] Tempests, violent enough to destroy all cultivated plants, often spare those of spontaneous growth. During the present summer, I have seen in Northern Italy, vineyards, maize fields, mulberry and fruit trees completely stripped of their foliage by hail, while the forest trees scattered through the meadows, and the shrubs and brambles which sprang up by the wayside, pa.s.sed through the ordeal with scarcely the loss of a leaflet.

[54] The boar spear is provided with a short crossbar, to enable the hunter to keep the infuriated animal at bay after he has transfixed him.

[55] Some botanists think that a species of water lily represented in many Egyptian tombs has become extinct, and the papyrus, which must have once been abundant in Egypt, is now found only in a very few localities near the mouth of the Nile. It grows very well and ripens its seeds in the waters of the Anapus near Syracuse, and I have seen it in garden ponds at Messina and in Malta. There is no apparent reason for believing that it could not be easily cultivated in Egypt, to any extent, if there were any special motive for encouraging its growth.

[56] Although it is not known that man has extirpated any vegetable, the mysterious diseases which have, for the last twenty years, so injuriously affected the potato, the vine, the orange, the olive, and silk husbandry--whether in this case the malady resides in the mulberry or in the insect--are ascribed by some to a climatic deterioration produced by excessive destruction of the woods. As will be seen in the next chapter, a r.e.t.a.r.dation in the period of spring has been observed in numerous localities in Southern Europe, as well as in the United States.

This change has been thought to favor the multiplication of the obscure parasites which cause the injury to the vegetables just mentioned.

Babinet supposes the parasites which attack the grape and the potato to be animal, not vegetable, and he ascribes their multiplication to excessive manuring and stimulation of the growth of the plants on which they live. They are now generally, if not universally, regarded as vegetable, and if they are so, Babinet's theory would be even more plausible than on his own supposition.--_etudes et Lectures_, ii, p.

269.

It is a fact of some interest in agricultural economy, that the oidium, which is so destructive to the grape, has produced no pecuniary loss to the proprietors of the vineyards in France. "The price of wine," says Lavergne, "has quintupled, and as the product of the vintage has not diminished in the same proportion, the crisis has been, on the whole, rather advantageous than detrimental to the country."--_economie Rurale de la France_, pp. 263, 264.

France produces a considerable surplus of wines for exportation, and the sales to foreign consumers are the princ.i.p.al source of profit to French vinegrowers. In Northern Italy, on the contrary, which exports little wine, there has been no such increase in the price of wine as to compensate the great diminution in the yield of the vines, and the loss of this harvest is severely felt. In Sicily, however, which exports much wine, prices have risen as rapidly as in France. Waltershausen informs us that in the years 1838-'42, the red wine of Mount Etna sold at the rate of one kreuzer and a half, or one cent the bottle, and sometimes even at but two thirds that price, but that at present it commands five or six times as much.

The grape disease has operated severely on small cultivators whose vineyards only furnished a supply for domestic use, but Sicily has received a compensation in the immense increase which it has occasioned in both the product and the profits of the sulphur mines. Flour of sulphur is applied to the vine as a remedy against the disease, and the operation is repeated from two to three or four--and even, it is said, eight or ten times--in a season. Hence there is a great demand for sulphur in all the vine-growing countries of Europe, and Waltershausen estimates the annual consumption of that mineral for this single purpose at 850,000 _centner_, or more than forty thousand tons. The price of sulphur has risen in about the same proportion as that of wine.--WALTERSHAUSEN, _Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau_, pp. 19, 20.

[57] Some recent observations of the learned traveller Wetzstein are worthy of special notice. "The soil of the Hauran," he remarks, "produces, in its primitive condition, much wild rye, which is not known as a cultivated plant in Syria, and much wild barley and oats. These cereals precisely resemble the corresponding cultivated plants in leaf, ear, size, and height of straw, but their grains are sensibly flatter and poorer in flour."--_Reisebericht uber Hauran und die Trachonen_, p.

40.

[58] This remark is much less applicable to fruit trees than to garden vegetables and the cerealia. The wild orange of Florida, though once considered indigenous, is now generally thought by botanists to be descended from the European orange introduced by the early colonists.

The fig and the olive are found growing wild in every country where those trees are cultivated. The wild fig differs from the domesticated in its habits, its season of fructification, and its insect population, but is, I believe, not specifically distinguishable from the garden fig, though I do not know that it is reclaimable by cultivation. The wild olive, which is so abundant in the Tuscan Maremma, produces good fruit without further care, when thinned out and freed from the shade of other trees, and is particularly suited for grafting. See SALVAGNOLI, _Memorie sulle Maremme_, pp. 63-73. See _Appendix_, No. 12.