Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/623

Rh After this long succession of physical revolutions, man appears as a denizen of the Europe thus prepared for him. The earliest records of his presence reveal him as a fisher and hunter, with rude flint-pointed spear and harpoon. And doubtless for many a dim century such was his condition. He made no more impress on external nature than one of the beasts which he chased. But in course of time, as civilization grew, he asserted his claim to be one of the geographical forces of the globe. Not content with gathering the fruits and capturing the animals which he found needful for his wants, he gradually entered on a contest with Nature to subdue the earth and to possess it. Nowhere has this warfare been fought out so vigorously as on the surface of Europe. On the one hand, wide dark regions of ancient forest have given place to smiling cornfields. Peat and moor have made way for pasture and tillage. On the other hand, by the clearance of woodlands the rainfall has been so diminished that drought and barrenness have spread where verdure and luxuriance once prevailed. Rivers have been straightened and made to keep their channels, the sea has been barred back from its former shores. For many generations the surface of the continent has been covered with roads, villages, and towns, bridges, aqueducts, and canals, to which this century has added a multitudinous network of railways, with their embankments and tunnels. In short, wherever man has lived, the ground beneath him bears witness to his presence. It is slowly covered with a stratum either wholly formed by him or due in great measure to his operations. The soil under old cities has been increased to a depth of many feet by the rubbish of his buildings; the level of the streets of modern Rome stands high above that of the pavement of the Cæsars, and that again above the roadways of the early republic. Over cultivated fields his potsherds are turned up in abundance by the plow. The loam has risen within the walls of his graveyards as generation after generation has moldered into dust.

It must be owned that man, in most of his struggles with the world around him, has fought blindly for his own ultimate interests. His contest, successful for the moment, has too often led to sure and sad disaster. Stripping forests from hill and mountain, he has gained his immediate object in the possession of their abundant stores of timber; but he has laid open the slopes to be parched by drought, or to be swept bare by rain. Countries once rich in beauty, and plenteous in all that was needful for his support, are now burned and barren, or almost denuded of their soil. Gradually he has been taught by his own bitter experience, that while his aim still is to subdue the earth, he can attain it, not by setting Nature and her laws at defiance, but by enlisting them in his service. He has learned at last to be the minister and interpreter of Nature, and he finds in her a ready and unrepining slave.

In fine, looking back across the long cycles of change through which