THE LEGAL POSITION OF WOMEN AND ITS MORAL EFFECTS - 93 Meliora. ART. I.-THE INFLUENCE OF MAN ON NATURE. 1. Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. By George P. Marsh. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston. 1864. 2. The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. By Sir Charles Lyell, F.R.S. Third Edition. London: James Murray. 1863. 3. Pre-Historic Man. Researches into the Origin of Civilization in the Old and the New World. By Daniel Wilson, LL.D., Professor of History and English Literature in University College, Toronto, Canada. 2 Vols. Cambridge: Macmillan and Co. 1862. 4. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, etc. By Charles Darwin, M.A. Fifth Thousand. London: James Murray. 1860. 5. The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. A Fragment. By Charles Babbage, Esq. Second Edition. London: James Murray. 1836. THE HE problems of centuries are not solved in a day or a generation. The growth of man's knowledge is at best very slow, in spite of the marvellous strides it may now and then make through the genius of a few men. It took thousands of years to discover the revolution of the earth, the circulation of the blood, and the law of gravitation. In fact, the slowness with which such great but now apparently simple truths have been discovered, favours the idea of man's primitive condition as held by the evolutionists as strongly as any other facts they can bring to uphold it, especially when we take into account the greater period of time that later researches have endeavoured to show that man has been upon the earth. Perhaps the early location of man on a site where nature was prodigal of her bounties, and easily solicited to production, may have hindered scientific discovery, and that it was left to men of a Vol. 8.-No. 29. later later age and more inhospitable clime to read her riddles and map out her laws of action and reaction. In the silent watchings of the Chaldæan pastures, the pure presence of other worlds drew them from the earth, and inspired them to contemplation and discovery. Man ranged amongst the stars, and related himself to that other world we know not of, long before the earth he trod on had vexed his brain with unquiet thought. It was well it was so. Like us, he might have forgotten the hereafter by a too absorbing study of the here and now. In the lapse of long years human life gradually assumed other and completer forms. Arts, sciences, and institutions were developed. The centres of civilization changed, and dynasty after dynasty passed away. History exhibits this flux and reflux to us, but it is singularly barren of details respecting co-existing changes of equal importance. Centuries of civilization changed the very face of the habitable world, and gradually effected unforeseen and disastrous alterations in what we may call its normal state. Many of the old centres of civilization, wealth, and industry ceased to be as. productive as formerly, and some became altogether barren and unfruitful. The great agent in effecting, these changes was man. Living in high civilization, indeed, but ignorant, as he is in part still, of the conditions of his being, of the laws of common natural phenomena, and of the complex web of cause and effect that runs up from his casual actions or his more deliberate efforts to the unresolved masses of meteorological phenomena and the solemn grandeurs of planetary evolution, he wasted and ruined the once fairest portions of the earth, turning the wilderness first into a garden, and then transforming the very garden into a desert. Parts of Africa, Arabia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Tartary, Greece, and the old provinces of the Roman Empire, bear indisputable evidence of this exhaustive, disastrous change. All the old problems have a new significance in view of these sad initial facts, had we but space to consider them. Some of them are approximatively answered in the volumes at the head of this article, and others we must for the present consider insoluble. For ourselves, we must be content merely to indicate this huge initial fact, and pass to a consideration of the newer and fresher sense of the influence of man upon nature that Mr. Marsh's book suggests, and to present some facts bearing upon it in many ways, gathered from other sources. In his endeavour to demonstrate this great fact no one can complain if Mr. Marsh follows the method of so distinguished a philosopher as Sir C. Lyell, and refers the changes of the past |