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

footnotes which were incorrect have been corrected. Also, errors found in page number references within Appendix have been corrected. MAN AND NATURE; OR, PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AS MODIFIED BY HUMAN ACTION. BY GEORGE P. MARSH. "Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world, have done so much to revolutionize the earth as Man , the power of an endless life, has done since the day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it."— H. Bushnell , Sermon on the Power of an Endless Life . NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO., No. 654 BROADWAY. 1867. Entered , according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by CHARLES SCRIBNER, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. JOHN F. TROW & CO. PRINTER, STEREOTYPER, AND ELECTROTYPER, 46, 48, & 50 Greene St., New York. P R E F A C E. The object of the present volume is: to indicate the character and, approximately, the extent of the changes produced by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we inhabit; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the inorganic world; to suggest the possibility and the importance of the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvement of waste and exhausted regions; and, incidentally, to illustrate the doctrine, that man is, in both kind and degree, a power of a higher order than any of the other forms of animated life, which, like him, are nourished at the table of bounteous nature. In the rudest stages of life, man depends upon spontaneous animal and vegetable growth for food and clothing, and his consumption of such products consequently diminishes the numerical abundance of the species which serve his uses. At more advanced periods, he protects and propagates certain esculent vegetables and certain fowls and quadrupeds, and, at the same time, wars upon rival organisms which prey upon these objects of his care or obstruct the increase of their numbers. Hence the action of man upon the organic world tends to subvert the original balance of its species, and while it reduces the numbers of some of them, or even extirpates them altogether, it multiplies other forms of animal…