Man and Nature Part 4

"Mr. Josiah Parkes, the consulting engineer of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, says that worms are great a.s.sistants to the drainer, and valuable aids to the farmer in keeping up the fertility of the soil.

He says they love moist, but not wet soils; they will bore down to, but not into water; they multiply rapidly on land after drainage, and prefer a deeply dried soil. On examining with Mr. Thomas Hammond, of Penhurst, Kent, part of a field 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 it. He also showed him a piece of pasture land near to his house, in which worms were in such numbers that he thought their casts interfered too much with its produce, which induced him to have it rolled at night in order to destroy the worms. The result was, that the fertility of the field greatly declined, nor was it restored until they had recruited their numbers, which was aided by collecting and transporting mult.i.tudes of worms from the fields.

"The great depth into which worms will bore, and from which they push up fine fertile soil, and cast it on the surface, has been admirably 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 layer of rich mould, several inches thick--thus affording nourishment to the roots of gra.s.ses, and increasing the productiveness of the soil."

It should be added that the writer quoted, and others who have discussed the subject, have overlooked one very important element in the fertilization produced by earthworms. I refer to the enrichment of the soil by their 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 consider the prodigious numbers of these worms found on a single square yard of some soils, we may easily see that they furnish no insignificant contribution to the nutritive material required for the growth of plants.[86]

The perforations of the earthworm mechanically affect the texture of the soil and its permeability by water, and they therefore have a certain influence on the form and character of surface. But the geographical importance of insects proper, as well as of worms, depends princ.i.p.ally on their connection with vegetable life as agents of its fecundation, and of its destruction.[87] I am acquainted with no single fact so strikingly ill.u.s.trative of this importance, as the following statement which I take from a notice of Darwin's volume, On Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilized by Insects, in the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, of October 18, 1862: "The net result is, 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, she has established a police among insects themselves, by which some of them keep down or promote the increase of others; for there are insects, as well as birds and beasts, of prey. The existence of an insect which fertilizes a useful vegetable may depend on that of another, which const.i.tutes his food in some stage of his life, and this other again may be as injurious to some plant as his destroyer is beneficial to another. The equation of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life.

This much, however, we seem authorized to conclude: as often as we destroy the balance by deranging the original proportions between different orders of spontaneous 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 corresponding quant.i.ty from the other. In other words, destruction must be either repaired by reproduction, or compensated by new destruction in an opposite quarter.

The parlor aquarium has taught even those to whom it is but an amusing toy, that the balance of animal and vegetable life must be preserved, and that the excess of either is fatal to the other, in the artificial tank as 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 scrupulous care with which aquatic vegetation had been excluded from the reservoir, and the consequent death and decay of the animalculae which could not be shut out, nor live in the water without the vegetable element.[88]

_Introduction of Insects._

The general tendency of man's encroachments upon spontaneous nature has been to increase insect life at the expense of vegetation and of the smaller quadrupeds and birds. Doubtless there are insects in all woods, but in temperate climates they are comparatively few and harmless, and the most numerous tribes which breed in the forest, or rather in its waters, and indeed in all solitudes, are those which little injure vegetation, such as mosquitoes, gnats, and the like. With the cultivated plants of man come the myriad tribes which feed or breed upon them, and agriculture not only introduces new species, but so multiplies the number of individuals as to defy calculation. Newly introduced vegetables frequently escape for years the insect plagues which had infested them in their native habitat; but the importation of other varieties of the plant, the exchange of seed, or some mere accident, is sure in the long run to carry the egg, the larva, or the chrysalis to the most distant sh.o.r.es where the plant a.s.signed to it by nature as its possession has preceded 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 provided to limit their devastations in the Old World, are much more destructive than in Europe.

It is not known that the wheat midge is preyed upon in America by any other insect, and in seasons favorable to it, it multiplies to a degree which would prove almost fatal to the entire harvest, were it not that, in the great territorial extent of the United States, there is room for such differences of soil and climate as, in a given year, to present in one State all the conditions favorable to the increase of a particular insect, while in another, the natural influences are hostile to it. The only apparent remedy for this evil is, to balance the disproportionate development of noxious foreign species by bringing from their native country the tribes which prey upon them. This, it seems, has been attempted. The United States' Census Report for 1860, p. 82, states that the New York Agricultural Society "has introduced into this country from abroad certain parasites which Providence has created to counteract the destructive powers of some of these depredators."

This is, however, not the only purpose for which man has designedly introduced foreign forms of insect life. The eggs of the silkworm are known to have been brought from the farther East to Europe in the sixth century, and new silk spinners which feed on the castor oil bean and the ailanthus, have recently been reared in France and in South America 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 States by European colonists, in the latter part of the seventeenth century; it did not cross the Mississippi till the close of the eighteenth, and it is only within the last five or six years that it has been transported to California, where it was previously unknown. The Italian stingless bee has very lately been introduced into the United States.

The insects and worms intentionally transplanted by man bear but a small proportion to those accidentally introduced by him. Plants and animals often carry their 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 transfer in both directions the minute organisms that are, in one way or another, a.s.sociated with almost every object important to the material interests of man.[90]

The tenacity of life possessed by many insects, their prodigious fecundity, the length of time they often remain in the different phases of their existence,[91] the security of the retreats into which their small dimensions enable them to retire, are all circ.u.mstances very favorable not only to the perpetuity of their species, but to their transportation to distant climates and their multiplication in their new homes. The teredo, so destructive to shipping, has been carried by the vessels whose 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 part.i.tions 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 wholly consumed without showing any external sign of the damage it has sustained. The termite is found also in other parts of France, and particularly at Roch.e.l.le, where, thus far, its ravages are confined to a single quarter of the city. A borer, of similar habits, is not uncommon in Italy, and you may see in that country, handsome chairs and other furniture which have been reduced by this insect to a framework of powder of post, covered, and apparently held together, by nothing but the varnish.

The carnivorous, and often the herbivorous insects render an important service to man by consuming dead and decaying animal and vegetable matter, the decomposition of which would otherwise fill the air with effluvia noxious to health. Some of them, the grave-digger beetle, for instance, 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 the larva state, justify the appellation of nature's scavengers which has been bestowed upon them, and there is very little doubt that, in warm countries, they consume a much larger quant.i.ty of putrescent organic material than the quadrupeds and the birds which feed upon such aliment.

_Destruction of Insects._

It is well known to naturalists, but less familiarly to common observers, that the aquatic larvae of some insects const.i.tute, at certain seasons, a large part of the food of fresh-water fish, while other larvae, in their turn, prey upon the sp.a.w.n and even the young of their persecutors.[93] The larvae of the mosquito and the gnat are the favorite food of the trout in the wooded regions where those insects abound.[94]

Earlier in the year the trout feeds on the larvae of the May fly, which is itself very destructive to the sp.a.w.n 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 pampers the epicure, may occasion a scarcity of this latter fish in waters where he would otherwise be abundant. Thus all nature is linked together by invisible bonds, and every organic creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some other among the myriad forms of life with which the Creator has peopled the earth.

I have said that man has promoted the increase of the insect and the worm, by destroying the bird and the fish which feed upon them. Many insects, in the four different stages of their growth, inhabit in succession the earth, the water, and the air. In each of these elements they have their special enemies, and, deep and dark as are the minute recesses in which they hide themselves, they are pursued to the remotest, obscurest corners by the executioners that nature has appointed to punish their delinquencies, and furnished with cunning contrivances for ferreting out the offenders and dragging them into the light of day. One tribe of birds, the woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, seems to depend for subsistence almost wholly on those insects which breed in dead or dying trees, and it is, perhaps, 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 larvae, 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 woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, whose strong bills enable them to penetrate to the very heart of the tree and drag out the lurking larvae. After a few years, the stubs fall, or, as wood becomes valuable, are cut and carried off for firewood, and, at the same time, the farmer selects for felling, in the forest he has reserved as a permanent source of supply of fuel and timber, the decaying trees which, like the dead stems in the fields, serve as a home for both the worm and his pursuer. We thus gradually extirpate this tribe of insects, and, with them, the species of birds which subsist princ.i.p.ally upon them.

Thus the fine, large, red-headed woodp.e.c.k.e.r, _Picus erythrocephalus_, formerly very common in New England, has almost entirely disappeared from those States, since the dead trees are gone, and the apples, his favorite vegetable food, are less abundant.

There are even large quadrupeds which feed almost exclusively upon insects. The ant bear is strong enough to pull down the clay houses built by the species of termites that const.i.tute 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 yet reached Europe--is provided with a very slender, hook-nailed finger, long enough to reach far into a hole in the trunk of a tree, and extract the worm which bored it.

_Reptiles._

But perhaps the most formidable foes of the insect, and even of the small rodents, are the reptiles. The chameleon approaches the insect perched upon the twig of a tree, with an almost imperceptible slowness of motion, until, at the distance of a foot, he shoots out his long, slimy tongue, and rarely fails to secure the victim. Even the slow toad catches the swift and wary housefly in the same manner; and in the warm countries of Europe, the numerous lizards contribute very essentially to the reduction of the insect population, which they both 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 enemies but man, though in the tropics other animals prey upon them.[95] It is doubtful whether any species of serpent has been exterminated within the human period, and even the dense population of China has not been able completely to rid itself of the viper. They have, however, almost entirely disappeared from particular localities. The rattlesnake is now wholly unknown in many large districts where it was extremely common half a century ago, and Palestine has long been, if not absolutely free from venomous serpents, at least very nearly so.[96]

_Destruction of Fish._

The inhabitants of the waters seem comparatively secure from human pursuit or interference by the inaccessibility of their retreats, and by our ignorance of their habits--a natural result of the difficulty of observing the ways of creatures living in a medium in which we cannot exist. Human agency has, nevertheless, both directly and incidentally, produced great changes in the population of the sea, the lakes, and the rivers, and if the effects of such revolutions in aquatic life are apparently of small importance in general geography, they are still not wholly inappreciable. The great diminution 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 Biscayans seem to have been particularly successful in this as indeed in other branches of nautical industry.[98] Five hundred years ago, whales abounded in every sea. They long since became so rare in the Mediterranean as not to afford encouragement for the fishery as a regular occupation; and the great demand for oil and whalebone for mechanical and manufacturing purposes, in the present century, has stimulated the pursuit of the "hugest of living creatures" to such activity, that he has now almost wholly disappeared from many favorite fishing grounds, and in others is greatly diminished in numbers.

What special functions, besides his uses to man, are a.s.signed to the whale in the economy of nature, we do not know; but some considerations, suggested by the character of the food upon which certain species subsist, deserve to be specially noticed. None of the great mammals grouped under the general name of whale are rapacious. They all live upon small organisms, and the most numerous species feed almost wholly upon the soft gelatinous mollusks in which the sea abounds in all lat.i.tudes. We cannot calculate even approximately the number of the whales, or the quant.i.ty of organic nutriment consumed 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 and the European vessels engaged in this fishery would form an island of no inconsiderable dimensions, and each one of those taken must have consumed, in the course of his growth, many times his own weight of mollusks. The destruction of the whales must have been followed by a proportional increase of the organisms they feed upon, and if we had the means of comparing the statistics of these humble forms of life, for even so short a period as that between the years 1760 and 1860, we should find a difference sufficient, possibly, to suggest an explanation of some phenomena at present unaccounted for.

For instance, as I have observed in another work,[100] the phosph.o.r.escence of the sea was unknown to ancient writers, or at least scarcely noticed by them, and even Homer--who, blind as tradition makes him when he composed his epics, had seen, and marked, in earlier life, all that the glorious nature of the Mediterranean and its coasts discloses to unscientific observation--nowhere alludes to this most beautiful and striking of maritime wonders. In the pa.s.sage 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 not possible that, in modern times, the animalculae which produce it may have immensely multiplied, from the destruction of their natural enemies by man, and hence that the gleam shot forth by their decomposition, or by their living processes, is both more frequent and more brilliant than in the days of cla.s.sic antiquity?

Although the whale does not prey upon smaller creatures resembling himself in form and habits, yet true fishes are extremely voracious, and almost every tribe devours unsparingly the feebler species, and even the sp.a.w.n and young of its own. The enormous destruction of the pike, the trout family, and other ravenous fish, as well as of the fishing birds, the seal, and the otter, by man, would naturally have occasioned a great increase in the weaker and more defenceless fish on which they feed, 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 formerly abounded. The result is, that man has greatly reduced the numbers of all larger marine animals, and consequently indirectly favored the multiplication of the smaller aquatic organisms which entered into their nutriment. This change in the relations of the organic and inorganic matter of the sea must have exercised an influence on the latter. What that influence has been, we cannot say, still less can we predict what it will be hereafter; but its action is not for that reason the less certain.

_Introduction and Breeding of Fish._

The introduction and successful breeding of fish of foreign species appears to have been long practised in China and was not unknown to the Greeks and Romans. This art has been revived in modern times, but thus far without any important results, economical or physical, though there seems to be good reason to believe it may be employed with advantage on an extended scale. As in the case of plants, man has sometimes undesignedly introduced new species of aquatic animals into countries distant from their birthplace. The accidental escape of the Chinese goldfish from ponds where they were bred as a garden ornament, has peopled some European, and it is said American streams with this species. Ca.n.a.ls 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 Ca.n.a.l, 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 regions have now more species common to both than before the ca.n.a.l was opened. Some accidental attraction not unfrequently induces fish to follow a vessel for days in succession, and they may thus be enticed into zones very distant from their native habitat. Several years ago, I was told at Constantinople, upon good authority, that a couple of fish, of a species wholly unknown to the natives, had just been taken in the Bosphorus.

They were alleged to have followed an English ship from the Thames, and to have been frequently observed by the crew during the pa.s.sage, but I was unable to learn their specific character.

Many of the fish which pa.s.s the greater part of the year in salt water sp.a.w.n in fresh, and some fresh-water species, the common brook trout of New England for instance, which, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, never visit the sea, will, if transferred to brooks emptying directly into the ocean, go down into the salt water after sp.a.w.ning time, and return again the next season. Sea fish, 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 a.s.sumed, a maritime bay--into fresh.[102] The presence of the seal is hardly conclusive on this point, for it is sometimes seen in Lake Champlain at the distance of some hundreds of miles from even brackish water. One of these animals was killed on the ice in that lake in February, 1810, another in February, 1846,[103] and remains of the seal have been found at other times in the same waters.

The remains of the higher orders of aquatic animals are generally so perishable that, even where most abundant, they do not appear to be now forming permanent deposits of any considerable magnitude; but it is quite otherwise with sh.e.l.l fish, and, as we shall see hereafter, with many of the minute limeworkers of the sea. There are, on the southern coast of the United States, beds of sh.e.l.ls so extensive that they were formerly supposed to have been naturally acc.u.mulated, and were appealed 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 geographical changes of no small importance. The transplantation of oysters to artificial ponds has long been common, and it appears to have recently succeeded well on a large scale in the open sea on the French coast. A great extension of this fishery is hoped for, and it is now proposed to introduce upon the same coast the American soft clam, which is so abundant in the tide-washed beach sands of Long Island Sound as to form an important article in the diet of the neighboring population.

The intentional naturalization of foreign fish, as I have said, has not thus far yielded important fruits; but though this particular branch of what is called, not very happily, _pisciculture_, has not yet established its claims to the attention of the physical geographer or the political economist, the artificial breeding of domestic fish has already produced very valuable results, and is apparently destined to occupy an extremely conspicuous place in the history of man's efforts to compensate his prodigal waste of the gifts of nature. The restoration of the primitive abundance of salt and fresh water fish, is one of the greatest material benefits that, with our present physical 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 quant.i.ties, 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, and give it out in the dry season for irrigation, but as breeding ponds for fish, and would thus, without further cost, yield a larger supply of human food than can at present be obtained from them even at a great expenditure of capital and labor in agricultural operations. The additions which might be made to the nutriment of the civilized world by a judicious administration of the resources of the waters, would allow some restriction of the amount of soil at present employed for agricultural purposes, and a corresponding extension of the area of the forest, and would thus facilitate a return to primitive geographical arrangements which it is important partially to restore.

_Extirpation of Aquatic Animals._

It does not seem probable that man, with all his rapacity and all his enginery, will succeed in totally extirpating any salt-water fish, but he has already exterminated at least one marine warm-blooded animal--Steller's sea cow--and the walrus, the sea lion, and other large amphibia, as well as the princ.i.p.al fishing quadrupeds, are in imminent danger of extinction. Steller's sea cow, _Rhytina Stelleri_, was first seen by Europeans in the year 1741, on Bering's Island. It was a huge amphibious mammal, weighing not less than eight 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, that, in the course of twenty-seven years, the sea cow, described by Steller as extremely numerous in 1741, is believed to have been completely extirpated, not a single individual having been seen since the year 1768. The various tribes of seals in the Northern and Southern Pacific, the walrus and the sea otter, are already so reduced in numbers that they seem destined soon to follow the sea cow, unless protected by legislation stringent enough, and a police energetic enough, to repress the ardent cupidity of their pursuers.

The seals, the otter tribe, and many other amphibia which feed almost exclusively upon fish, are extremely voracious, and of course their destruction or numerical reduction must have favored the multiplication of the species of fish princ.i.p.ally preyed upon by them. I have been a.s.sured 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 intelligent and observing hunter, who has pa.s.sed a great part of his life in the forest, after carefully watching the habits of the fresh-water otter of the Northern American States, estimates their consumption of fish at about four pounds per day.

Man has promoted the multiplication of fish by making war on their brute enemies, but he has by no means thereby compensated his own greater destructiveness.[105] The bird and beast of prey, whether on land or in the water, hunt only as long as they feel the stimulus of hunger, their ravages are limited by the demands of present appet.i.te, and they 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 sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean may have wherewithal to satisfy the cravings of the stomach during next year's Lent, without imperilling his soul by violating the discipline of the papal church; and all the arrangements of his fisheries are so organized as to involve the destruction of many more fish than are secured for human use, and the loss of a large proportion of the annual harvest of the sea in the process of curing, or in transportation to the places of its consumption.[106]

Fish are more affected than quadrupeds by slight and even imperceptible differences in their breeding places and feeding grounds. Every river, every brook, every lake stamps a special character upon its salmon, its shad, and its trout, which is at once recognized by those who deal in or consume them. No skill can give the fish fattened by food selected and 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 acquainted with both continents, is probably due less to specific difference than to the fact that, even in the parts of the New World which have been longest cultivated, wild nature is not yet tamed down to the character it has a.s.sumed in the Old, and which it will acquire in America also when her civilization shall be as ancient as is now that of Europe.

Man has. .h.i.therto hardly anywhere produced such climatic or other changes as would suffice of themselves totally to banish the wild inhabitants of the dry land, and the disappearance of the native birds and quadrupeds from particular localities is to be ascribed quite as much to his direct persecutions as to the want of forest shelter, of appropriate food, or of other conditions indispensable to their existence. But almost all the processes of agriculture, and of mechanical and chemical industry, are fatally destructive to aquatic animals within reach of their influence.

When, in consequence of clearing the woods, the changes already described as thereby produced in the beds and currents of rivers, are in progress, the sp.a.w.ning 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 inundations chokes the fish; and, finally, the quickened velocity of its current sweeps them down into the larger rivers or into the sea, before they are yet strong enough to support so great a change of circ.u.mstances.[107] Industrial operations are not less destructive to fish which live or sp.a.w.n in fresh water. Milldams impede their migrations, if they do not absolutely prevent them, the sawdust from lumber mills clogs their gills, and the thousand deleterious mineral substances, discharged into rivers from metallurgical, chemical, and manufacturing establishments, poison them by shoals.

_Minute Organisms._

Besides the larger creatures of the land and of the sea, the quadrupeds, the reptiles, the birds, the amphibia, the crustacea, the fish, the insects, and the worms, there are other countless forms of vital being.

Earth, water, the ducts and fluids of vegetable and of animal life, the very air we breathe, are peopled by minute organisms which perform most important functions in both the living and the inanimate kingdoms of nature. Of the offices a.s.signed to these creatures, the most familiar to common observation is the extraction of lime, and more rarely, of silex, from the waters inhabited by them, and the deposit of these minerals in a solid form, either as the material of their habitations or as the exuviae of their bodies. The microscope and other means of scientific observation a.s.sure 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 animalculae so small as to become visible only by the aid of lenses magnifying a hundred times the linear measures. It is popularly supposed that animalculae, 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, contains at the depth of ten or fifteen feet below the surface, living elaborators of silex;[108] and a microscopic examination of a handful of earth connected with the material evidences of guilt has enabled the naturalist to point out the very spot where a crime was committed. It has been computed that one sixth part of the solid matter let fall by great rivers at their outlets consists of still recognizable infusory sh.e.l.ls and shields, and, as the friction of rolling water must reduce much of these fragile structures to a state of comminution which even the microscope cannot resolve into distinct particles and identify as relics of animal or of vegetable life, we must conclude that a considerably larger proportion of river deposits is really the product of animalcules.[109]

It is evident that the chemical, and in many cases the mechanical character of a great number of the objects important in the material economy of human life, must be affected by the presence of so large an organic element in their substance, and it is equally obvious that all agricultural and all industrial operations 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 ground, the rotations of cultivated crops, must prove fatal to millions of living things upon every rood of surface thus deranged by man, and must, at the same time, more or less fully compensate this destruction of life by promoting the growth and multiplication of other tribes equally minute in dimensions.

I do not know that man has yet endeavored to avail himself, by artificial contrivances, of the agency of these wonderful architects and manufacturers. We are hardly well enough acquainted with their natural economy to devise means to turn their industry to profitable account, and they are in very many cases too slow in producing visible results for an age so impatient as ours. The over-civilization of the nineteenth century cannot wait for wealth to be ama.s.sed by infinitesimal gains, and we are in haste to _speculate_ upon the powers of nature, 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 navigation at one point, and check the formation of a reef at another, by diverting a current of fresh water from the former and pouring it into the sea at the latter. Cases may probably be found in tropical seas, where rivers have prevented the working of the coral animalcules in straits separating islands from each other or from the mainland. The diversion of such streams might remove this obstacle, and reefs consequently be formed which should convert an archipelago into a single large island, and finally join that to the neighboring continent.

Quatref.a.ges proposed to destroy the teredo in harbors by impregnating the water with a mineral solution fatal to them. Perhaps the labors of the coralline animals might be arrested over a considerable extent of sea coast by similar means. 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 the American coast, where the Gulf stream would furnish a suitable temperature beyond the climatic limits that otherwise confine its growth; and thus a new source of profit might perhaps be added to the scanty returns of the hardy fisherman.

In certain geological formations, the diatomaceae deposit, at the bottom of fresh-water ponds, beds of silicious shields, valuable as a material for a species of very light firebrick, in the manufacture of water gla.s.s and of hydraulic cement, and ultimately, doubtless, in many yet undiscovered industrial processes. An attentive study of the conditions favorable to the propagation of the diatomaceae 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 imperfect.