The city of Rome imported from Sicily, from Africa, and from the Levant, enormous quantities of grain for gratuitous distribution among the lower classes of the capital. The pecuniary value of the gems, the spices, the unguents, the perfumes, the cosmetics and the tissues, which came principally from the East, was great, but these articles were neither heavy nor bulky and their transportation required but a small amount of shipping. The marbles, the obelisks, the statuary and other objects of art plundered in conquered provinces by Roman generals and governors, the wild animals, such as elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, camelopards and the larger beasts of prey imported for slaughter at the public games, and the prisoners captured in foreign wars and brought to Italy for sale as slaves or butchery as gladiators, furnished employment for much more tonnage than all the legitimate commerce of the empire, with the possible exception of wheat. Independently of the direct testimony of Latin authors, the Greek statuary, the Egyptian obelisks, and the vast quantities of foreign marbles, granite, parphyry, basalt, and other stones used in sculpture and in architecture, which have been found in the remains of ancient Rome, show that the Imperial capital must have employed an immense amount of tonnage in the importation of heavy articles for which there could have been no return freight, unless in the way of military transportation. Some of the Egyptian obelisks at Rome weigh upwards of four hundred tons, and many of the red granite columns from the same country must have exceeded one hundred tons. Greek and African marbles were largely used not only for columns, contablatures, and solid walls, but for casing the exterior and veneering the interior of public and private buildings. Scaurus imported, for the scene alone of a temporary theatre designed to stand scarcely for a month, three hundred and sixty columns, which were disposed in three tiers, the lower range being forty-two feet in height—See Pliny, Nat. Hist., Lib. xxxvi. Italy produced very little for export, and her importations, when not consisting of booty, were chiefly paid for in coin which was principally either the spoil of war or the fruit of official extortion.]

England imports annually about 600,000 tons of sugar, 100,000 tons of jute, and about the same quantity of esparto, six million tons of cotton, of which the value of $30,000,000 is exported again in the form of manufactured, goods—including, by a strange industrial revolution, a large amount of cotton yarn and cotton tissues sent to India and directly or indirectly paid for by raw cotton to be manufactured in England—30,000 tons of tobacco, from 100,000 to 350,000 tons of guano, hundreds of thousands of tons of tea, coffee, cacao, caoutchone, gutta-percha and numerous other important articles of trade wholly unknown, as objects of commerce, to the ancient European world; and this immense importation is balanced by a corresponding amount of exportation, not consisting, however, by any means, exclusively of articles new to commerce. [Footnote: Many of these articles would undoubtedly have been made known to the Greeks and Romans and have figured in their commerce, but for the slowness and costliness of ancient navigation, which, in the seas familiar to them, was suspended for a full third of the year from the inability of their vessels to cope with winter weather. The present speed and economy of transportation have wrought and are still working strange commercial and industrial revolutions. Algeria now supplies Northern Germany with fresh cauliflowers, and in the early spring the market-gardeners of Naples find it more profitable to send their first fruits to St. Petersburg than to furnish them to Florence and Rome.]

FOREIGN PLANTS, HOW INTRODUCED.

Besides the vegetables I have mentioned, we know that many plants of smaller economical value have been the subjects of international exchange in very recent times. Busbequius, Austrian ambassador at Constantinople about the middle of the sixteenth century—whose letters contain one of the best accounts of Turkish life which have appeared down to the present day—brought home from the Ottoman capital the lilac and the tulip. The Belgian Clusius about the same time introduced from the East the horse chestnut, which has since wandered to America. The weeping willows of Europe and the United States are said to have sprung from a slip received from Smyrna by the poet Pope; and planted by him in an English garden; Drouyn de l'IIuys, in a discourse delivered before the French Societe d'Acclimatation, in 1860, claims for Rabelais the introduction of the melon, the artichoke and the Alexandria pink into France; and the Portuguese declare that the progenitor of all the European and American oranges was an Oriental tree transplanted to Lisbon, and still living in the last generation. [Footnote: 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.—See Amari, Storia del Musulmani in Sicilia, vol ii., p. 445.

The date-palms of eastern and southern Spain were certainly introduced by the Moors. Leo Von Rozmital, who visited Barcelona in 1476, says that the date-tree grew in great abundance in the environs of that city and ripened its fruit well. It is now scarcely cultivated further north than Valencia. It is singular that Ritter in his very full monograph on the palm does not mention those of Spain.

On the introduction of conifera into England see an interesting article in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1864.

Muller, Das Buch der Pfianzenrodt, p. 86, asserts 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.] The present favorite flowers of the parterres of Europe have been imported from America, Japan and other remote Oriental countries, within a century and a half, and, in fine, there are few vegetables of any agricultural importance, few ornamental trees or decorative plants, which are not now common to the three civilized continents.

The statistics of vegetable emigration exhibit numerical results quite surprising to those not familiar with the subject. The lonely island of St. Helena is described as producing, at the time of its discovery in the year 1501, about sixty vegetable species, including some three or four known to grow elsewhere also. [Footnote: It may be considered very highly probable, if not certain, that the undiscriminating herbalists of the sixteenth century must have overlooked many plants native to this island. An English botanist, in an hour's visit to Aden, discovered several species of plants on rocks always reported, even by scientific travellers, as absolutely barren. But after all, it appears to be well established that the original flora of St. Helena was extremely limited, though now counting hundreds of species.] At the present time its flora numbers seven hundred and fifty species—a natural result of the position of the island as the half-way house on the great ocean highway between Europe and the East. Humboldt and Bonpland found, among the unquestionably indigenous plants of tropical America, monocotyledons only, all the dicotyledons of those extensive regions having been probably introduced after the colonization of the New World by Spain.

The seven hundred new species which have found their way to St. Helena within three centuries and a half, were certainly not all, or ever in the largest proportion, designedly planted there by human art, and if we were well acquainted with vegetable emigration, we should probably be able to show that man has intentionally transferred fewer plants than he has accidentally introduced into countries foreign to them. After the wheat, follow the tares that infest it. The woods that grow among the cereal grains, the pests of the kitchen garden, are the same in America as in Europe. [Footnote: 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.] The overturning of a wagon, or any of the thousand accidents which befall the emigrant in his journey across the Western plains, may scatter upon the ground the seeds he designed for his garden, and the herbs which fill so important a place in the rustic materia medica of the Eastern States, spring up along the prairie paths but just opened by the caravan of the settler. [Footnote: 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 cluster 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 afterwards, 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—comfrey and snake-root, which grow only where there were convents and other dwellings in the Middle Ages."—Bogens Indvandring & de Daneke Skove, pp. 1, 2. ]

Introduction of Foreign Plants.

"A negro slave of the great Cortez," says Humboldt, "was the first who sowed wheat in New Spain. He found three grains of it among the rice which had been brought from Spain as food for the soldiers."

About twenty years ago, a Japanese forage plant, the Lesperadeza striata, whose seeds had been brought to the United States by some unknown accident made its appearance in one of the Southern States. It spread spontaneously in various directions, and in a few years was widely diffused. It grows upon poor and exhausted soils, where the formation of a turf or sward by the ordinary grasses would be impossible, and where consequently no regular pastures or meadows can exist. It makes excellent fodder for stock, and though its value is contested, it is nevertheless generally thought a very important addition to the agricultural resources of the South. [Footnote: Accidents sometimes limit, as well as promote the propagation of foreign vegetables in countries new to them. The Lombardy poplar is a deciduous tree, and is very easily grown from cuttings. In most of the countries into which it has been introduced the cuttings hare 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 circumstance, for otherwise this most worthless and least ornamental of trees would spread with a rapidity that would make it an annoyance to the agriculturist.]

In most of the Southern countries of Europe, the sheep and horned cattle winter on the plains, but in the summer are driven, sometimes many days' journey, to mountain pastures. Their coats and fleeces transport seeds in both directions. Hence we see Alpine plants in champaign districts, the plants of the plains on the borders of the glaciers, though in neither case do these vegetables ripen their seeds and propagate themselves. This explains the occurrence of tufts of common red clover with pallid and sickly flowers, on the flanks of the Alps at heights exceeding seven thousand feet.

The hortus siccus of a botanist may accidentally sow seeds from the foot of the Himalayas on the plains that skirt the Alps; and it is a fact of very familiar observation, that exotics, transplanted to foreign climates suited to their growth, often escape from the flower garden and naturalize themselves among the spontaneous vegetation of the pastures. When the cases containing the artistic treasures of Thorvaldsen wore opened in the court of the museum where they are deposited, the straw and grass employed in packing them were scattered upon the ground, and the next season there sprang up from the seeds no less than twenty-five species of plants belonging to the Roman campagna, some of which were preserved and cultivated as a new tribute to the memory of the great Scandinavian sculptor, and at least four are said to have spontaneously naturalized themselves about Copenhagen. [Footnote: Vaupell, Bogens Indvandring i de Danske Skove, p. 2.]

The Turkish armies, in their incursions into Europe, brought Eastern vegetables in their train, and left the seeds of Oriental wall plants to grow upon the ramparts of Buda and Vienna. [Footnote: I believe it is certain that the Turks introduced tobacco into 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.]

In the campaign of 1814, the Russian troops brought, in the stuffing of their saddles and by other accidental means, seeds from the banks of the Dnieper to the valley of the Rhine, and even introduced the plants of the steppes into the environs of Paris.

The forage imported for the French army in the war of 1870-1871 has introduced numerous plants from Northern Africa and other countries into France, and this vegetable emigration is so extensive and so varied in character, that it will probably have an important botanical, and even economical, effect on the flora of that country. [Footnote: In a communication lately made to the French Academy, M. Vibraye gives numerous interesting details on this subject, and says the appearance of the many new plants observed in France in 1871, "results from forage supplied from abroad, the seeds of which had fallen upon the ground. At the present time, several Mediterranean plants, chiefly Algerian, having braved the cold of an exceptionally severe winter, are being largely propagated, forming extensive meadows, and changing soil that was formerly arid and produced no vegetable of importance into veritable oases." See Nature, Aug. 1, 1872, p. 263. We shall see on a following page that canals are efficient agencies in the unintentional interchange of organic life, vegetable as well as animal, between regions connected by such channels.]

The Canada thistle, Erigeron Canadense, which is said to have accompanied the early French voyagers to Canada from Normandy, is reported to have been introduced into other parts of Europe two hundred years ago by a seed which dropped out of the stuffed skin of an American bird.

VEGETABLE POWER OF ACCOMMODATION.

The vegetables which, so far as we know their history, seem to have been longest objects of human care, can, by painstaking industry, be made to grow under a great variety of circumstances, and some of them prosper nearly equally well when planted and tended on soils of almost any geological character; but the seeds of most of them 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.

The vine genus is very catholic and cosmopolite in its habits, but particular varieties are extremely fastidious and exclusive in their requirements as to soil and climate. The stocks of many celebrated vineyards lose their peculiar qualities by transplantation, and the most famous wines are capable of production only in certain well-defined and for the most part narrow districts. The Ionian vine which bears the little stoneless grape known in commerce as the Zante currant, has resisted almost all efforts to naturalize it elsewhere, and is scarcely grown except in two or three of the Ionian islands and in a narrow territory on the northern shores of the Morea.

The attempts to introduce European varieties of the vine into the United States have not been successful except in California, [Footnote: In 1869, a vine of a European variety planted in Sta. Barbara county in 1833 measured a foot in diameter four foot above the ground. Its ramifications covered ten thousand square feet of surface and it annually produces twelve thousand pounds of grapes. The bunches are sixteen or eighteen inches long, and weigh six or seven pounds.-Letter from Commissioner of Land-Office, dated May 13, 1860.] and it may be stated as a general rule that European forest and ornamental trees are not suited to the climate of North America, and that, at the same time, American garden vegetables are less luxuriant, productive and tasteful in Europe than in the United States.

The saline atmosphere of the sea is specially injurious both to seeds and to very many young plants, and it is only recently that the transportation of some very important vegetables across the ocean lines been made practicable, through the invention of Ward's air-tight glass cases. By this means large numbers of the trees which produce the Jesuit's bark were successfully transplanted from America to the British possessions in the East, where this valuable plant may now be said to have become fully naturalized. [Footnote: See Cleghorn, Forests and Gardens of South India, Edinburgh, 1861, and The British Parliamentary return on the Chinchona Plant, 1866. It has been found that the seeds of several species of CINCHONA preserve their vitality long enough to be transported to distant regions. The swiftness of steam navigation render it possible to transport to foreign countries not only seeds but delicate living plants which could not have borne a long voyage by sailing vessels.]

Vegetables, naturalized abroad either by accident or design, sometimes exhibit a greatly increased luxuriance of growth.

The European cardoon, an esculent thistle, has broken out from the gardens of the Spanish colonies on the La Plata, acquired a gigantic stature, and propagated itself, in impenetrable thickets, over hundreds of leagues of the Pampas; and the Anacharis alsinastrum, a water plant not much inclined to spread in its native American habitat, has found its way into English rivers, and extended itself to such a degree as to form a serious obstruction to the flow of the current, and even to navigation.

Not only do many wild plants exhibit a remarkable facility of accommodation, but their seeds usually possess great tenacity of life, and their germinating power resists very severe trials. Hence, while the seeds of many cultivated vegetables lose their vitality in two or three years, and can be transported safely to distant countries only with great precautions, the weeds that infest those vegetables, though not cared for by man, continue to accompany him in his migrations, and find a new home on every soil he colonizes. Nature fights in defence of her free children, but wars upon them when they have deserted her banners and tamely submitted to the domination of man. [Footnote: Tempests, violent enough to destroy all cultivated plants, frequently spare those of spontaneous growth. I have often 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 wayslde, passed through the ordeal with scarcely the loss of a leaflet.]

Indeed, the faculty of spontaneous reproduction and perpetuation necessarily supposes a greater power of accommodation, within a certain range, than we find in most domesticated plants, for it would rarely happen that the seed of a wild plant would fall into ground as nearly similar, in composition and condition, to that where its parent grew, as the soils of different fields artificially prepared for growing a particular vegetable are to each other. Accordingly, though every wild species affects a habitat of a particular character, it is found that, if accidentally or designedly sown elsewhere, it will grow under conditions extremely unlike those of its birthplace. Cooper says: "We cannot say positively that any plant is uncultivable ANYWHERE until it has been tried;" and this seems to be even more true of wild than of domesticated vegetation.

The wild plant is much hardier than the domesticated vegetable, and the same law prevails in animated brute and even human life. The beasts of the chase are more capable of endurance and privation and more tenacious of life, than the domesticated animals which most nearly resemble them. The savage fights on, after he has received half a dozen mortal wounds, the least of which would have instantly paralyzed the strength of his civilized enemy, and, like the wild boar, he has been known to press forward along the shaft of the spear which was trans-piercing his vitals, and to deal a deathblow on the soldier who wielded it.

True, domesticated plants can be gradually acclimatized to bear a degree of heat or of cold, which, in their wild state, they would not have supported; the trained English racer out-strips the swiftest horse of the pampas or prairies, perhaps even the less systematically educated courser of the Arab; the strength of the European, as tested by the dynamometer, is greater than that of the New Zealander. But all these are instances of excessive development of particular capacities and faculties at the expense of general vital power. Expose untamed and domesticated forms of life, together, to an entire set of physical conditions equally alien to the former habits of both, so that every power of resistance and accommodation shall be called into action, and the wild plant or animal will live, while the domesticated will perish.

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS OF THE UNITED STATES.

According to the census of 1870, the United States had, on the first of June in that year, in round numbers, 189,000,000 acres of improved land, the quantity having been increased by 16,000,000 acres within the ten years next preceding. [Footnote: Ninth Census of the United States, 1872, p. 841. By "improved" land, in the reports on the census of the United States, is meant "cleared land" used for grazing, grass, or tillage, or which is now fallow, connected with or belonging to a farm."—Instructions to Marshals and Assistants, Census of 1870.] Not to mention less important crops, this land produced, in the year ending on the day last mentioned, in round numbers, 288,000,000 bushels of wheat, 17,000,000 bushels of rye, 282,000,000 bushels of oats, 6,000,000 bushels of peas and beans, 30,000,000 bushels of barley, orchard fruits to the value of $47,000,000, 640,000 bushels of cloverseed, 580,000 bushels of other grass seed, 13,000 tons of hemp, 27,000,000 pounds of flax, and 1,730,000 bushels of flaxseed. These vegetable growths were familiar to ancient European agriculture, but they were all introduced into North America after the close of the sixteenth century.

Of the fruits of agricultural industry unknown to the Greeks and Romans, or too little employed by them to be of any commercial importance, the United States produced, in the same year, 74,000,000 pounds of rice, 10,000,000 bushels of buckwheat, 3,000,000 bales of cotton, [Footnote: Cotton, though cultivated in Asia from the remotest antiquity, and known as a rare and costly product to the Latins and the Greeks, was not used by them except as an article of luxury, nor did it enter into their commerce to any considerable extent as a regular object 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. Cottonseed was sown in Virginia as early as 1621, but was not cultivated with a view to profit for more than a century afterwards. Sea-island cotton was first grown on the coast of Georgia in 1786, the seed having been brought from the Bahamas, when it had been introduced from Anguilla—BIGELOW, Les Etats-Unis en 1868, p. 370]. 87,000 hogsheads of cane sugar, 6,600,000 gallons of cane molasses, 16,000,000 gallons of sorghum molasses, all yielded by vegetables introduced into that country within two hundred years, and—with the exception of buckwheat, the origin of which is uncertain, and of cotton—all, directly or indirectly, from the East Indies; besides, from indigenous plants unknown to ancient agriculture, 761,000,000 bushels of Indian corn, 263,000,000 pounds of tobacco, 143,000,000 bushels of potatoes, 22,000,000 bushels of sweet potatoes, 28,000,000 pounds of maple sugar, and 925,000 gallons of maple molasses. [Footnote: There is a falling off since 1860 of 11,000,000 pounds in the quantity of maple sugar and of more than a million gallons of maple molasses. The high price of cane sugar during and since the late civil war must have increased the product of maple sugar and molasses beyond what it otherwise would have been, but the domestic warfare on the woods has more than compensated this cause of increase.] To all this we are to add 27,000,000 tons of hay,—produced partly by new, partly by long known, partly by exotic and partly by native herbs and grasses, the value of $21,000,000 in garden vegetables chiefly of European or Asiatic origin, 3,000,000 gallons of wine, and many minor agricultural products. [Footnote: Raenie, Bochmeria tenacissima, a species of Chinese nettle producing a fibre which may be spun and woven, and which unites many of the properties of silk and of linen, has been completely naturalized in the United States, and results important to the industry of the country are expected from it.]

The weight of this harvest of a year would be many times the tonnage of all the shipping of the United States at the close of the year 1870—and, with the exception of the maple sugar, the maple molasses, and the products of the Western prairie lands and of some small Indian clearings, it was all grown upon lands wrested from the forest by the European race within little more than two hundred years. The wants of Europe have introduced into the colonies of tropical America the sugar cane, [Footnote: 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.] the coffee plant, the orange and the lemon, all of Oriental origin, have immensely stimulated the cultivation of the former two in the countries of which they are natives, and, of course, promoted agricultural operations which must have affected the geography of those regions to an extent proportionate to the scale on which they have been pursued.

USEFUL AMERICAN PLANTS GROWN IN EUROPE.

America has partially repaid her debt to the Eastern continent. Maize and the potato are very valuable additions to the field agriculture of Europe and the East, and the tomato is no mean gift to the kitchen gardens of the Old World, though certainly not an adequate return for the multitude of esculent roots and leguminous plants which the European colonists carried with them. [Footnote: 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 several common 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.

Cartier, A.D. 1535-'6, mentions "vines, great melons, cucumbers, gourds [courges], pease, beans of various colors, but not like ours," as common among the Indians of the banks of the St. Lawrence—Bref Recit, etc., reprint. Paris, 1863, pp. 13, a; 14, b; 20, b; 31, a.] I wish I could believe, with some, that America is not alone responsible for the introduction of the filthy weed, tobacco, the use of which is the most vulgar and pernicious habit engrafted by the semi-barbarism of modern civilization upon the less multifarious sensualism of ancient life; but the alleged occurrence of pipe-like objects in old Sclavonic, and, it has been said, in Hungarian sepulchres, is hardly sufficient evidence to convict those races of complicity in this grave offence against the temperance and the refinement of modern society.

EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLES.

Lamentable as are the evils produced by the too general felling of the woods in the Old World, I believe it does not appear that any species of native forest tree has yet been extirpated by man on the Eastern continent. The roots, stumps, trunks, and foliage found in bogs are recognized as belonging to still extant species. Except in some few cases where there is historical evidence that foreign material was employed, the timber of the oldest European buildings, and even of the lacustrine habitations of Switzerland, is evidently the product of trees still common in or near the countries where such architectural remains are found; nor have the Egyptian catacombs themselves revealed to us the former existence of any woods not now familiar to us as the growth of still living trees. [Footnote: 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.

Silphium, a famous medicinal plant of Lybia and of Persia, seems to have disappeared entirely. At any rate there is no proof that it now exists in either of those regions. The Silphium of Greek and Roman commerce appears to have come wholly from Cyrene, that from the Asiatic deserts being generally of less value, or, as Strabo says, perhaps of an inferior variety. The province near Cyrene which produced it was very limited, and according to Strabo (ed. Casaubon, p. 837), it was at one time almost entirely extirpated by the nomade Africans who invaded the province and rooted out the plant.

The vegetable which produced the Balm of Gilead has not been found in modern times, although the localities in which it anciently grew have been carefully explored.] It is, however, said that the yew tree, Taxus baccata, formerly very common in England, Germany, and—as we are authorized to infer from Theophrastus—in Greece, has almost wholly disappeared from the latter country, and seems to be dying out in Germany. The wood of the yew surpasses that of almost any other European tree in closeness and fineness of grain, and it is well known for the elasticity which of old made it so great a favorite with the English archer. It is much in request among wood carvers and turners, and the demand for it explains, in part, its increasing scarcity.

It is also asserted that no insect depends upon it for food or shelter, or aids in its fructification, and birds very rarely feed upon its berries: these are circumstances of no small importance, because the tree hence wants means of propagation or diffusion common to so many other plants. But it is alleged that the reproductive power of the yew is exhausted, and that it can no longer be readily propagated by the natural sowing of its seeds, or by artificial methods. If further investigation and careful experiment should establish this fact, it will go far to show that a climatic change, of a character unfavorable to the growth of the yew, has really taken place in Germany, though not yet proved by instrumental observation, and the most probable cause of such change would be found in the diminution of the area covered by the forests. The industry of man is said to have been so successful in the local extirpation of noxious or useless vegetables in China, that, with the exception of a few water plants in the rice grounds, it is sometimes impossible to find a single weed in an extensive district; and the late eminent agriculturist, Mr. Coke, is reported to have offered in vain a considerable reward for the detection of a weed in a large wheatfield on his estate in England. In these cases, however, there is no reason to suppose that diligent husbandry has done more than to eradicate the pests of agriculture within a comparatively limited area, and the cockle and the darnel will probably remain to plague the slovenly cultivator as long as the cereal grains continue to bless him. [Footnote: Although it is not known that man has absolutely 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, are ascribed by some to a climatic deterioration produced by excessive destruction of the woods. As will be seen in the next chapter, a retardation in the period of spring has been observed in numerous localities in Southern Europe, as well as in the United States, and this change has been thought to favor the multiplication of the obscure parasites which causee the injury to the vegetables 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, it 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 large surplus of wines for exportation, and the sales to foreign consumers are the principal 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 sometimes even 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 the wine.—Waltershausen, Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau, pp. 19, 20.]

All the operations of rural husbandry are destructive to spontaneous vegetation by the voluntary substitution of domestic for wild plants, and, as we have seen, the armies of the colonist are attended by troops of irregular and unrecognized camp-followers, which soon establish and propagate themselves over the new conquests. These unbidden and hungry guests—the gipsies of the vegetable world—often have great aptitude for accommodation and acclimation, and sometimes even crowd out the native growth to make room for themselves. The botanist Latham informs us that indigenous flowering plants, once abundant on the North-Western prairies, have been so nearly extirpated by the inroads of half-wild vegetables which have come in the train of the Eastern immigrant, that there is reason to fear that, in a few years, his herbarium will constitute the only evidence of their former existence. [Footnote: Report of Commissioner of Agriculture of the United States for 1870.]

There are plants—themselves perhaps sometimes stragglers from their proper habitat—which are found only in small numbers and in few localities. These are eagerly sought by the botanist, and some such species are believed to be on the very verge of extinction, from the zeal of collectors.

ANIMAL LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL AGENCY.

The quantitative value of animated life, as a geological agency, seems to be inversely as the volume of the individual organism; for nature supplies by numbers what is wanting in the bulk of the animal out of whose remains or structures she forms strata covering whole provinces, and builds up from the depths of the sea large islands, if not continents. There are, it is true, near the mouths of the great Siberian rivers which empty themselves into the Polar Sea, drift islands composed, in an incredibly large proportion, of the bones and tusks of elephants, mastodons, and other huge pachyderms, and many extensive caves in various parts of the world are half filled with the skeletons of quadrupeds, sometimes lying loose in the earth, sometimes cemented together into an osseous breccia by a calcareous deposit or other binding material. These remains of large animals, though found in comparatively late formations, generally belong to extinct species, and their modern congeners or representatives do not exist in sufficient numbers to be of sensible importance in geology or in geography by the mere mass of their skeletons. [Footnote: Could the bones and other relics of the domestic quadrupeds destroyed by disease or slaughtered for human use in civilized countries be collected into large deposits, as obscure causes have gathered together those of extinct animals, they would soon form aggregations which might almost be called mountains. There were in the United States, in 1870, as we shall see hereafter, nearly one hundred millions of horses, black cattle, sheep, and swine. There are great numbers of all the same animals in the British American Provinces and in Mexico, and there are large herds of wild horses on the plains, and of tamed among the independent Indian tribes of North America. It would perhaps not be extravagant to suppose that all these cattle may amount to two thirds as many as those of the United States, and thus we have in North America a total of 160,000,000 domestic quadrupeds belonging to species introduced by European colonization, besides dogs, cats, and other four-footed household pets and pests, also of foreign origin.

If we allow half a solid foot to the skeleton and other slowly destructible parts of each animal, the remains of these herds would form a cubical mass measuring not much short of four hundred and fifty feet to the side, or a pyramid equal in dimensions to that of Cheops, and as the average life of these animals does not exceed six or seven years, the accumulations of their bones, horns, hoofs, and other durable remains would amount to at least fifteen times as great a volume in a single century. It is true that the actual mass of solid matter, left by the decay of dead domestic quadrupeds and permanently added to the crust of the earth, is not so great as this calculation makes it. The greatest proportion of the soft parts of domestic animals, and even of the bones, is soon decomposed, through direct consumption by man and other carnivora, industrial use, and employment as manure, and enters into new combinations in which its animal origin is scarcely traceable; there is, nevertheless, a large annual residuum, which, like decayed vegetable matter, becomes a part of the superficial mould; and in any event, brute life immensely changes the form and character of the superficial strata, if it does not sensibly augment the quantity of the matter composing them. The remains of man, too, add to the earthy coating that covers the face of the globe. The human bodies deposited in the catacombs during the long, long ages of Egyptian history, would perhaps build as large a pile as one generation of the quadrupeds of the United States. In the barbarous days of old Moslem warfare, the conquerors erected large pyramids of human skulls. The soil of cemeteries in the great cities of Europe has sometimes been raised several feet by the deposit of the dead during a few generations. In the East, Turks and Christians alike bury bodies but a cople of feet beneath the sculptures of the ignoble poor, and of those whose monuments time or accident has removed, are opened again and again to receive fresh occupants. Hence the ground in Oriental cemeteries is pervaded with relics of humanity, of not wholly composed of them; and an examination of the soil of the lower part of the Petit Champ des Morts, at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the observer that it consists almost exclusively of the comminuted bones of his fellow-man.] But the vegetable products found with them, and, in rare cases, in the stomachs of some of them, are those of yet extant plants; and besides this evidence, the discovery of works of human art, deposited in juxtaposition with fossil bones, and evidently at the same time and by the same agency which buried these latter—not to speak of human bones found in the same strata—proves that the animals whose former existence they testify were contemporaneous with man, and possibly even extirpated by him. [Footnote: The bones of mammoths and mastodons, in many instances, appear to have been grazed or cut by flint arrow-heads or other stone weapons, and the bones of animals now extinct are often wrought into arms and utensils, or split to extract the marrow. These accounts have often been discredited, because it has been assumed that the extinction of these animals was more ancient than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it certain that this conclusion has been too hastily adopted.

On page 143 of the Antiquity of Man, Lyell remarks that man "no doubt played his part in hastening the era of the extincion" of the large pachyderms and beasts of prey; but, as contemporaneous species of other animals, which man cannot be supposed to have extirpated, have also become extinct, he argues that the disappearance of the quadrupeds in question cannot be ascribed to human action alone.

On this point it may be observed that, as we cannot know what precise physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct organism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified by the action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of such organisms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no just idea.] I do not propose to enter upon the thorny question, whether the existing races of man are genealogically connected with these ancient types of humanity, and I advert to these facts only for the sake of the suggestion, that man, in his earliest known stages of existence, was probably a destructive power upon the earth, though perhaps not so emphatically as his present representatives. The larger wild animals are not now numerous enough in any one region to form extensive deposits by their remains; but they have, nevertheless, a certain geographical importance. If the myriads of large browsing and grazing quadrupeds which wander over the plains of Southern Africa—and the slaughter of which by thousands is the source of a ferocious pleasure and a brutal triumph to professedly civilized hunters—if the herds of the American bison, which are numbered by hundreds of thousands, do not produce visible changes in the forms of terrestrial surface, they have at least an immense influence on the growth and distribution of vegetable life, and, of course, indirectly upon all the physical conditions of soil and climate between which and vegetation a mutual interdependence exists. In the preceding chapter I referred to the agency of the beaver in the formation of bogs as producing sensible geographical effects.

I am disposed to think that more bogs in the Northern States owe their origin to beavers than to accidental obstructions of rivulets by wind-fallen or naturally decayed trees; for there are few swamps in those States, at the outlets of which we may not, by careful search, find the remains of a beaver dam. The beaver sometimes inhabits natural lakelets and even large rivers like the Upper Mississippi, when the current is not too rapid, but he prefers to owe his pond to his own ingenuity and toil. The reservoir once constructed, its inhabitants rapidly multiply so long as the trees, and the harvests of pond lilies and other aquatic plants on which this quadruped feeds in winter, suffice for the supply of the growing population. But the extension of the water causes the death of the neighboring trees, and the annual growth of those which could be reached by canals and floated to the pond soon becomes insufficient for the wants of the community, and the beaver metropolis now sends out expeditions of discovery and colonization. The pond gradually fills up, by the operation of the same causes as when it owes its existence to an accidental obstruction, and when, at last, the original settlement is converted into a bog by the usual processes of vegetable life, the remaining inhabitants abandon it and build on some virgin brooklet a new city of the waters. [Footnote: I find confirmation of my own observations on this point (published in 1863) in the North-West Passage by Land of Milton and Cheadle, London, 1865. These travellers observed "a long chain of marshes formed by the damming up of a stream which had now ceased to exist," Chap. X. In Chap. XII, they state that "nearly every stream between the Pembina and the Athabasca—except the large river McLeod—appeared to have been destroyed by the agency of the beaver," and they question whether the vast extent of swampy ground in that region "has not been brought to this condition by the work of beavers who have thus destroyed, by their own labor, the streams necessary to their own existence."

But even here nature provides a remedy, for when the process of "consolidation" referred to in treating of bogs in the first chapter shall have been completed, and the forest re-established upon the marshes, the water now diffused through them will be collected in the lower or more yielding portions, cut new channels for their flow, become running brooks, and thus restore the ancient aspect of the surface.

The authors add the curious observation that the beavers of the present day seem to be a degenerate race, as they neither fell huge trees not construct great dams, while their progenitors cut down trees two feet in diameter and dammed up rivers a hundred feet in width. The change in the habits of the beaver is probably due to the diminution of their numbers since the introduction of fire-arms, and to the tact that their hydraulic operations are more frequently interrupted by the encroachments of man. In the valley of the Yellowstone, which has but lately been much visited by the white man, Hayden saw stumps of trees thirty inches in diameter which had been cut down by beavers. —Geological Survey of Wyoming, p. 135.

The American beaver closely resembles his European congener, and I believe most naturalists now regard them as identical. A difference of speceies has been inferred from a difference in their modes of life, the European animal being solitary and not a builder, the American gregarious and constructive. But late careful researches in Germany have shown the former existence of numerous beaver dams in that country, though the animal, having becaome rare to form colonies, has of course ceased to attempt works which require the co-operation of numerous individuals.—Schleiden, Fur Baum und Wald Leipzig, 1870, p. 68.

On the question of identity and on all others relating to this interesting animal, see L.H. Morgan's important monograph, The American Beaver and his Works, Philadelphia, 1868. Among the many new facts observed by this investigator is the construction of canals by the beaver to float trunks and branches of trees to his ponds. These canals are sometimes 600 to 700 feet long, with a width of two or three feet and a depth of one to one and a half.]

INFLUENCE OF ANIMAL LIFE ON VEGETATION

The influence of wild quadrupeds upon vegetable life have been little studied, and not many facts bearing upon it have been recorded, but, so far as it is known, it appears to be conservative rather than pernicious. Few wild animals depend for their subsistence on vegetable products obtainable only by the destruction of the plant, and they seem to confine their consumption almost exclusively to the annual harvest of leaf or twig, or at least of parts of the vegetable easily reproduced. If there are exceptions to this rule, they are in cases where the numbers of the animal are so proportioned to the abundance of the vegetable that there is no danger of the extermination of the plant from the voracity of the quadruped, or of the extinction of the quadruped from the scarcity of the plant. [Footnote: European foresters speak of the action of the squirrel as injurious to trees. Doubtless this is sometimes true in the case of artificial forests, but in woods of spontaneous growth, ordered and governed by nature, the squirrel does not attack trees, or at least the injury he may do is too trifling to be perceptible, but he is a formidable enemy to the plantation. "The squirrels bite the cones of the pine and consume the seed which might serve to restock the wood; they do still more mischief by gnawing off, near the leading shoot, a strip of bark, and thus often completely girdling the tree. Trees so injured must be felled, as they would never acquire a vigorous growth. The squirrel is especially destructive to the pine in Sologne, where he gnaws the bark of trees twenty or twenty-five years old." But even here, nature sometimes provides a compensation, by making the appetite of this quadruped serve to prevent an excessive production of seed cones, which tends to obstruct the due growth of the leading shoot. "In some of the pineries of Brittany which produce cones so abundantly as to strangle the development of the leading shoot of the maritime pine, it has been observed that the pines are most vigorous where the squirrels are most numerous, a result attributed to the repression of the cones by this rodent."—Boitel, Mise en valeur des Terres pauvres, p. 50.

Very interesting observations, on the agency of the squirrel and other small animals in planting and in destroying nuts and other seeds of trees, may be found in a paper on the Succession of Forests in Thoreau's Excursions, pp. 135 et seqq.

I once saw several quarts of beech-nuts taken from the winter quarters of a family of flying squirrels in a hollow tree. The kernels were neatly stripped of the shells and carefully stored in a dry cavity.] In diet and natural wants the bison resembles the ox, the ibex and the chamois assimilate themselves to the goat and the sheep; but while the wild animal does not appear to be a destructive agency in the garden of nature, his domestic congeners are eminently so. [Footnote: Evelyn thought the depasturing of grass by cattle serviceable to its growth. "The biting of cattle," he remarks, "gives a gentle loosening to the roots of the herbage, and makes it to grow fine and sweet, and their very breath and treading as well as soil, and the comfort of their warm bodies, is wholesome and marvellously cherishing."—Terra, or Philosophical Discourses of Earth, p. 86.

In a note upon this passage, Hunter observes: "Nice farmers consider the lying of a beast upon the ground, for one night only, as a sufficient tilth for the year. The breath of graminivorous quadrupeds does certainly enrich the roots of grass; a circumstance worthy of the attention of the philosophical farmer."—Terra, same page.

The "philosophical farmer" of the present day will not adopt these opinions without some qualification, and they certainly are not sustained by American observation.

The Report of the Department of Agriculture for March and April, 1872, states that the native grasses are disappearing from the prairies of Texas, especially on the bottom-lands, depasturing of cattle being destructive to them.] This is partly from the change of habits resulting from domestication and association with man, partly from the fact that the number of reclaimed animals is not determined by the natural relation of demand and spontaneous supply which regulates the multiplication of wild creatures, but by the convenience of man, who is, in comparatively few things, amenable to the control of the merely physical arrangements of nature. When the domesticated animal escapes from human jurisdiction, as in the case of the ox, the horse, the goat, and perhaps the ass—which, so far as I know, are the only well-authenticated instances of the complete emancipation of household quadrupeds—he becomes again an unresisting subject of nature, and all his economy is governed by the same laws as that of his fellows which have never been enslaved by man; but, so long as he obeys a human lord, he is an auxiliary in the warfare his master is ever waging against all existences except those which he can tame to a willing servitude.

ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF DOMESTIC QUADRUPEDS.

Civilization is so intimately associated with certain inferior forms of animal life, if not dependent on them, that cultivated man has never failed to accompany himself, in all his migrations, with some of these humble attendants. The ox, the horse, the sheep, and even the comparatively useless dog and cat, as well as several species of poultry, are voluntarily transferred by every emigrant colony, and they soon multiply to numbers far exceeding those of the wild genera most nearly corresponding to them. [Footnote: The rat and the mouse, though not voluntarily transported, are passengers by every ship that sails for a foreign port, and several species of these quadrupeds have, consequently, much extended their range and increased their numbers in modern times. From a story of Heliogabalus related by Lampridius, Hist. Aug. Scriptores, ed. Casaubon, 1690, p. 110, it would seem that mice at least were not very common in ancient Rome. Among the capricious freaks of that emperor, it is said that he undertook to investigate the statistics of the arachnoid population of the capital, and that 10,000 pounds of spiders (or spiders' webs—for aranea is equivocal) were readily collected; but when he got up a mouse-show, he thought ten thousand mice a very fair number. Rats are not less numerous in all great cities; and in Paris, where their skins are used for gloves, and their flesh, it is whispered, in some very complex and equivocal dishes, they are caught by legions. I have read of a manufacturer who contracted to buy of the rat-catchers, at a high price, all the rat-skins they could furnish before a certain date, and failed, within a week, for want of capital, when the stock of peltry had run up to 600,000.

Civilization has not contented itself with the introduction of domestic animals alone. The English sportsman imports foxes from the continent, and Grimalkin-like turns them loose in order that he may have the pleasure of chasing them afterwards.]

Of the origin of our domestic animals, we know historically nothing, because their domestication belongs to the ages which preceded written annals; but though they cannot all be specifically identified with now extant wild animals, it is presumable that they have been reclaimed from an originally wild state. Ancient writers have preserved to us fewer data respecting the introduction of domestic animals into new countries than respecting the transplantation of domestic vegetables. Ritter, in his learned essay on the camel, has shown that this animal was not employed by the Egyptians until a comparatively late period in their history; [Footnote: The horse and the ass were equally unknown to ancient Egypt, and do not appear in the sculptures before the XV. and XVI. dynasties. But even then, the horse was only known as a draught animal, and the only representation of a horseman yet found in the Egyptian tombs is on the blade of a battle axe of uncertain origin and period.] that he was unknown to the Carthaginians until after the downfall of their commonwealth; and that his first appearance in Western Africa is more recent still. The Bactrian camel was certainly brought from Asia Minor to the Northern shores of the Black Sea, by the Goths, in the third or fourth century, and the buffalo first appeared in Italy about A.D. 600, though it is unknown whence or by whom he was introduced. [Footnote: Erdkunde, viii., Asien, 1ste Abtheuung, pp. 660,758. Hehn, Kuttonpflanzen, p. 845.] The Arabian single-humped camel, or dromedary, has been carried to the Canary Islands, partially introduced into Australia, Greece, Spain, and even Tuscany, experimented upon to little purpose in Venezuela, and finally imported by the American Government into Texas and New Mexico, where it finds the climate and the vegetable products best suited to its wants, and promises to become a very useful agent in the promotion of the special civilization for which those regions are adapted.

Quadrupeds, both domestic and wild, bear the privations and discomforts of long voyages better than would be supposed. The elephant, the giraffe, the rhinoceros, and even the hippopotamus, do not seem to suffer much at sea. Some of the camels imported by the U.S. government into Texas from the Crimea and Northern Africa were a whole year on shipboard. On the other hand, George Sand, in Un Hiver au Midi, gives an amusing description of the sea-sickness of swine in the short passage from the Baleares to Barcelona. America had no domestic quadruped but a species of dog, the lama tribe, and, to a certain extent, the bison or buffalo. [Footnote: See Chapter III., post; also Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur, i., p. 71. From the anatomical character of the bones of the urus, or auerochs, found among the relics of the lacustrine population of ancient Switzerland, and from other circumstances, it is inferred that this animal had been domesticated by that people; and it is stated, I know not upon what authority, in Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia, that it had been tamed by the Veneti also. See Lyell, Antiquity of Man, pp. 24, 25, and the last-named work, p. 480. This is a fact of much interest, because it is one of the very few HISTORICALLY known instances of the extinction of a domestic quadruped, and the extreme improbability of such an event gives some countenance to the theory of the identity of the domestic ox with, and its descent from, the urus.]Of course, it owes the horse, the ass, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and the swine, as does also Australia, to European colonization. Modern Europe has, thus far, not accomplished much in the way of importation of new animals, though some interesting essays have been made. The reindeer was successfully introduced into Iceland about a century ago, while similar attempts failed, about the same time, in Scotland. The Cashmere or Thibet goat was brought to France a generation since, and succeeds well. The same or an allied species and the Asiatic buffalo were carried to South Carolina about the year 1850, and the former, at least, is thought likely to prove of permanent value in the United States. [Footnote: The goat introduced into South Carolina was brought from the district of Angora, in Asia Minor, which has long been celebrated for flocks of this valuable animal. It is calculated that more than a million of these goats are raised in that district, and it is commonly believed that the Angora goat and its wool degenerate when transported. Probably this is only an invention of the shepherds to prevent rivals from attempting to interfere with so profitable a monopoly. But if the popular prejudice has any foundation, the degeneracy is doubtless to be attributed to ignorance of the special treatment which long experience has taught the Angora shepherds, and the consequent neglect of such precautions as are necessary to the proper care of the animal. Throughout nearly the whole territory of the United States the success of the Angora goat is perfect, and it would undoubtedly thrive equally well in Italy, though it is very doubtful whether in either country the value of its fleece would compensate the damage it would do to the woods.] The yak, or Tartary ox, seems to thrive in France, and it is hoped that success will attend the present efforts to introduce the South American alpaca into Europe. [Footnote: The reproductive powers of animals, as well as of plants, seem to be sometimes stimulated in an extraordinary way by transfer to a foreign clime. The common warren rabbit introduced by the early colonists into the island of Madeira multiplied to such a degree as to threaten the extirpation of vegetation, and in Australia the same quadruped has become so numerous as to be a very serious evil. The colonists are obliged to employ professional rabbit-hunters, and one planter has enclosed his grounds by four miles of solid wall, at an expense of $6,000, to protect his crops against those ravagers.—Revue des Eaux et Forets, 1870, p. 38.]

According to the census of the United States for 1870, [Footnote: In the enumeration of farm stock, "sucking pigs, spring lambs, and calves," are omitted. I believe they are included in the numbers reported by the census of 1860. Horses and horned cattle in towns and cities were excluded from both enumerations, the law providing for returns on these points from rural districts only. On the whole, there is a diminution in the number of all farm stock, except sheep, since 1860. This is ascribed by the Report to the destruction of domestic quadrupeds during the civil war, but this hardly explains the reduction in the number of swine from 39,000,000 in 1800 to 25,000,000 in 1870.] the total number of horses in all the States of the American Union, was, in round numbers, 7,100,000; of asses and mules, 1,100,000; of the ox tribe, 25,000,000; of sheep, 28,000,000; and of swine, 25,000,000. The only indigenous North American quadruped sufficiently gregarious in habits, and sufficiently multiplied in numbers, to form really large herds, is the bison, or, as he is commonly called in America, the buffalo; and this animal is confined to the prairie region of the Mississippi basin, a small part of British America, and Northern Mexico. The engineers sent out to survey railroad routes to the Pacific estimated the number of a single herd of bisons seen within the last fifteen years on the great plains near the Upper Missouri, at not less than 200,000, and yet the range occupied by this animal is now very much smaller in area than it was when the whites first established themselves on the prairies. [Footnote: "About five miles from camp we ascended to the top of a high hill, and for a great distance ahead every square mile seemed to have a herd of buffalo upon it. Their number was variously estimated by the members of the party; by some as high as half a million. I do not think it any exaggeration to set it down at 200,000." Steven's Narrative and Final Report. Reports of Explorations and Surveys for Railroad to Pacific, vol xii, book i., 1860.

The next day the party fell in with a "buffalo trail," where at least 100,000 were thought to have crossed a slough.

As late as 1868, Sheridan's party estimated the number of bisons seen by them in a single day at 200,000.—Sheridan's Troopers on the Border, 1868, p. 41.] But it must be remarked that the American buffalo is a migratory animal, and that, at the season of his annual journeys, the whole stock of a vast extent of pasture-ground is collected into a single army, which is seen at or very near any one point only for a few days during the entire season. Hence there is risk of great error in estimating the numbers of the bison in a given district from the magnitude of the herds seen at or about the same time at a single place of observation; and, upon the whole, it is neither proved nor probable that the bison was ever, at any one time, as numerous in North America as the domestic bovine species is at present. The elk, the moose, the musk ox, the caribou, and the smaller quadrupeds popularly embraced under the general name of deer, though sufficient for the wants of a sparse savage population, were never numerically very abundant, and the carnivora which fed upon them were still less so. It is almost needless to add that the Rocky Mountain sheep and goat must always have been very rare.

Summing up the whole, then, it is evident that the wild quadrupeds of North America, even when most numerous, were few compared with their domestic successors, that they required a much less supply of vegetable food, and consequently were far less important as geographical elements than the many millions of hoofed and horned cattle now fed by civilized man on the same continent.

EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS.

Although man never fails greatly to diminish, and is perhaps destined ultimately to exterminate, such of the larger wild quadrupeds as he cannot profitably domesticate, yet their numbers often fluctuate, and oven after they seem almost extinct, they sometimes suddenly increase, without any intentional steps to promote such a result on his part. During the wars which followed the French Revolution, the wolf multiplied in many parts of Europe, partly because the hunters were withdrawn from the woods to chase a nobler game, and partly because the bodies of slain men and horses supplied this voracious quadraped with more abundant food. [Footnote: During the late civil war in America, deer and other animals of the chase multiplied rapidly in the regions of the Southern States which were partly depopulated and deprived of their sportsmen by the military operations of the contest, and the bear is said to have reappeared in districts where he had not been seen in the memory of living man.] The same animal became again more numerous in Poland after the general disarming of the rural population by the Russian Government. On the other hand, when the hunters pursue the wolf, the graminivorous wild quadrupeds increase, and thus in turn promote the multiplication of their great four-footed destroyer by augmenting the supply of his nourishment. So long as the fur of the beaver was extensively employed as a material for hats, it bore a very high price, and the chase of this quadruped was so keen that naturalists feared its speedy extinction. When a Parisian manufacturer invented the silk hat, which soon came into almost universal use, the demand for beavers' fur fell off, and the animal—whose habits are an important agency in the formation of bogs and other modifications of forest nature—immediately began to increase, reappeared in haunts which he had long abandoned, and can no longer be regarded as rare enough to be in immediate danger of extirpation. Thus the convenience or the caprice of Parisian fashion has unconsciously exercised an influence which may sensibly affect the physical geography of a distant continent.

Since the invention of gunpowder, gome quadrupeds have completely disappeared from many European and Asiatic countries where they were formerly numerous. The last wolf was killed in Great Britain two hundred years ago, and the bear was extirpated from that island still earlier. The lion is believed to have inhabited Asia Minor and Syria, and probably Greece and Sicily also, long after the commencement of the historical period, and he is even said to have been not yet extinct in the first-named two of these countries at the time of the first Crusade. [Footnote: In maintaining the recent existence of the lion in the countries named in the text, naturalists have, perhaps, laid. too much weight on the frequent occurrence of representations of this animal in sculptures apparently of a historical character. It will not do to argue, twenty centuries hence, that the lion and the unicorn were common in Great Britain in Queen Victoria's time because they are often seen "fighting for the crown" in the carvings and paintings of that period. Many paleontolgists, however, identify the great cat-like animal, whose skeletons are frequently found in British bone-caves, with the lion of our times.

The leopard (panthera), though already growing scarce, was found in Cilicia in Cicero's time. See his letter to Coelius, Epist. ad Diversos, Lib. II., Ep. 11.

The British wild ox is extinct except in a few English and Scottish parks, while in Irish bogs of no great apparent antiquity are found antlers which testify to the former existence of a stag much larger than any extant European species. Two large graminivorous or browsing quadrupeds, the ur and the schelk, once common in Germany, have been utterly extirpated, the eland and the auerochs nearly so. The Nibelungen-Lied, which, in the oldest form preserved to us, dates from about the year 1200, though its original composition no doubt belongs to an earlier period, thus sings:

Then slowe the dowghtie Sigfrid a wisent and an elk, he smote four stoute uroxen and a grim and sturdie schelk. [Footnote: Dar nach sluoger schiere, einen wisent unde elch. Starker ure viere, unt einen grimmen schelch. XVI. Aventiure.

The testimony of the Nibelungen-Lied is not conclusive evidence that these quadrupeds existed in Germany at the time of the composition of that poem. It proves too much; for, a few lines above those just quoted, Sigfrid is said to have killed a lion, an animal which the most patriotic Teuton will hardly claim as a denizen of mediaeval Germany.]

Modern naturalists identify the elk with the eland, the wisent with the auerochs. The period when the ur and the schelk became extinct is not known. The auerochs survived in Prussia until the middle of the last century, but unless it is identical with a similar quadruped said to be found on the Caucasus, it now exists only in the Russian imperial forest of Bialowitz where about a thousand are still preserved, and in some great menageries, as for example that at Schonbrunn, near Vienna, which, in 1852, had four specimens. The eland, which is closely allied to the American wapiti if not specifically the same animal, is still kept in the royal preserves of Prussia, to the number of four or five hundred individuals. The chamois is becoming rare, and the ibex or steinbock, once common in all the high Alps, is now believed to be confined to the Cogne mountains in Piedmont, between the valleys of the Dora Baltea and the Orco, though it is said that a few still linger about the Grandes Jorasses near Cormayeur.

The chase, which in early stages of human life was a necessity, has become with advancing civilization not merely a passion but a dilettanteism, and the cruel records of this pastime are among the most discreditable pages in modern literature. It is true that in India and other tropical countries, the number and ferocity of the wild beasts not only justify but command a war of extermination against them, but the indiscriminate slaughter of many quadrupeds which are favorite objects of the chase can urge no such apology. Late official reports from India state the number of human victims of the tiger, the leopard, the wolf and other beasts of prey, in ten "districts," at more then twelve thousand within three years, and we are informed on like authority that within the last six years more than ten thousand men, women, and children have perished in the same way in the Presidency of Bengal alone. One tiger, we are told, had killed more than a hundred people, and finally stopped the travel on an important road, and another had caused the desertion of thirteen villages and thrown 250 square miles out of cultivation. In such facts we find abundant justification of the slaying of seven thousand tigers, nearly six thousand leopards, and twenty-five hundred other ravenous beasts in the Bengal Presidency, in the space of half a dozen years. But the humane reader will not think the value of the flesh, the skin, and other less important products of inoffensive quadrupeds a satisfactory excuse for the ravages committed upon them by amateur sportsmen as well as by professional hunters. In 1861, it was computed that the supply of the English market with ivory cost the lives of 8,000 elephants. Others make the number much larger and it is said that half as much ivory is consumed in the United States as in Great Britain. In Ceylon, where the elephants are numerous and destructive to the crops, as well as dangerous to travellers, while their tusks are small and of comparatively little value, the government pays a small reward for killing them. According to Sir Emerson Tennant, [Footnote: Natural History of Ceylon, chap. iv.] in three years prior to 1848, the premium was paid for 3,500 elephants in a part of the northern district, and between 1851 and 1856 for 2,000 in the southern district. Major Rogers, famous as an elephant shooter in Ceylon, ceased to count his victims after he had slain 1,300, and Cumming in South Africa sacrificed his hecatombs every month.

In spite of the rarity of the chamois, his cautious shyness, and the comparative inaccessibility of his favorite haunts, Colani of Pontresina, who died in 1837, had killed not less than 2,000 of these animals; Kung, who is still living in the Upper Engadine, 1,500; Hitz, 1,300, and Zwichi an equal number; Soldani shot 1,100 or 1,200 in the mountains which enclose the Val Bregaglia, and there are many living hunters who can boast of having killed from 500 to 800 of these interesting quadrupeds. [Footnote: Although it is only in the severest cold of winter that the chamois descends to the vicinity of grounds occupied by man, its organization does not confine it to the mountains. In the royal park of Racconigi, on the plain a few miles from Turin, at a height of less than 1,000 feet, is kept a herd of thirty or forty chamois, which thrive and breed apparently as well as in the Alps.]

In America, the chase of the larger quadrupeds is not less destructive. In a late number of the American Naturalist, the present annual slaughter of the bison is calculated at the enormous number of 500,000, and the elk, the moose, the caribou, and the more familiar species of deer furnish, perhaps, as many victims. The most fortunate deer-hunter I have personally known in New England had killed but 960; but in the northern part of the State of New York, a single sportsman is said to have shot 1,500, and this number has been doubtless exceeded by zealous Nimrods of the West.

But so far as numbers are concerned, the statistics of the furtrade furnish the most surprising results. Russia sends annually to foreign markets not less than 20,000,000 squirrel skins, Great Britain has sometimes imported from South America 600,000 nutria skins in a year. The Leipzig market receives annually nearly 200,000 ermine, and the Hudson Bay Company is said to have occasionally burnt 20,000 ermine skins in order that the market might not be overstocked. Of course natural reproduction cannot keep pace with this enormous destruction, and many animals of much interest to natural science are in imminent danger of final extirpation. [Footnote: Objectionable as game laws are, they have done something to prevent the extinction of many quadrupeds, which naturalists would be loth to lose, and, as in the case of the British ox, private parks and preserves have saved other species from destruction. Some few wild aminals, such as the American mink, for example, have been protected and bred with profit, and in Pennsylvania an association of gentlemen has set apart, and is about enclosing, a park of 16,000 acres for the breeding of indigenous quadrupeds and fowls.]

LARGE MARINE ANIMALS RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT IN GEOGRAPHY.

Vast as is the bulk of some of the higher orders of aquatic animals, their remains 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 shell-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 shells so extensive that they were formerly supposed to have been naturally accumulated, and were appealed to as proofs of an elevation of the coast by geological causes; but they are now ascertained to have been derived chiefly from oysters and other shell-fish, 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.

INTRODUCTION AND BREEDING OF FISH.

The introduction and successful breeding of fish or foreign species appears to have been long practised in China, and was not unknown to the Greeks and Romans. [Footnote: The observations of COLUMELLA, de Re Rustica, lib. viii., sixteenth and following chapters, on fish-breeding, are interesting. The Romans not only stocked natural but constructed artificial ponds, of both fresh and salt water, and cut off bays of the sea for this purpose. They also naturalized various species of sea-fish in fresh water.] 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 now 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. Canals 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 Canal, 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 canal was opened. [Footnote: The opening or rather the reconstruction of the Claudian emissary by Prince Torlonia, designed to drain the Lake Fucinus, or Celano, has introduced the fish of that lake into the Liri or Garigliano which received the discharge from the lake.—Dorotea, Sommario storico dell' Alieutica, p. 60.]The opening of the Suez Canal will, no doubt, produce very interesting revolutions in the animal and vegetable population of both basins. The Mediterranean, with some local exceptions—such as the bays of Calabria, and the coast of Sicily so picturesquely described by Quatrefages [Footnote: Souvenire d'un Naturaliste, i., pp. 204 et seqq.]-is comparatively poor in marine vegetation, and in shell as well as in fin fish. The scarcity of fish in some of its gulfs is proverbial, and you may scrutinize long stretches of beach on its northern shores, after every south wind for a whole winter, without finding a dozen shells to reward your search. But no one who has not looked down into tropical or subtropical seas can conceive the amazing wealth of the Red Sea in organic life. Its bottom is carpeted or paved with marine plants, with zoophytes and with shells, while its waters are teeming with infinitely varied forms of moving life. Most of its vegetables and its animals, no doubt, are confined by the laws of their organization to a warmer temperature than that of the Mediterranean, but among them there must be many whose habitat is of a wider range, many whose powers of accommodation would enable them to acclimate themselves in a colder sea.

We may suppose the less numerous aquatic fauna and flora of the Mediterranean to be equally capable of climatic adaptation, and hence there will be a partial interchange of the organic population not already common to both seas. Destructive species, thus newly introduced, may diminish the numbers of their proper prey in either basin, and, on the other hand, the increased supply of appropriate food may greatly multiply the abundance of others, and at the same time add important contributions to the aliment of man in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean. [Footnote: The dissolution of the salts in the bed of the Bitter Lake impregnated the water admitted from the Red Sea so highly that for some time fish were not seen in that basin. The flow of the current through the canal has now reduced the proportion of saline matter to five per cent, and late travellers speak of fish as abundant in its waters.]

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 passage; but I was unable to learn their specific character. [Footnote: Seven or eight years ago, the Italian government imported from France a dredging machine for use in the harbor of La Spezia. The dredge brought attached to its hull a shell-fish not known in Italian waters. The mollusk, finding the local circumstances favorable, established itself in this new habitat, multiplied rapidly, and is now found almost everywhere on the west coast of the Peninsula.] Many of the fish which pass the greater part of the year in salt water spawn in fresh, and some fresh-water species, the common brook-trout of New England for instance, which under ordinary circumstances never visit the sea, will, if transferred to brooks emptying directly into the ocean, go down into the salt water after spawning-time, and return again the next season. Some sea fish have been naturalized in fresh water, and 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 assumed, a maritime bay-into fresh. [Footnote: Babinet, Etudes et Lectures, ii, pp. 108,110.] 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, [Footnote: Thompson, Natural History of Vermont, p. 38, and Appendix, p. 18. There is no reason to believe that the seal breeds in Lake Champlain, but the individual last taken there must have been some weeks, at least, in its waters. It was killed on the ice in the widest part of the lake, on the 23d of February, thirteen days after the surface was entirely frozen, except the usual small cracks, and a month or two after the ice closed at all points north of the place where the seal was found.] and remains of the seal have been found at other times in the same waters.

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, of the lobster and other crustacea, 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 arrangements for breeding fish in the Venetian lagoon of Comacchio date far back in the Middle Ages, but the example does not seem to have been followed elsewhere in Europe at that period, except in small ponds where the propagation of the fish was left to nature without much artificial aid. 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. Experimental pisciculture has been highly successful in the United States, and will probably soon become a regular branch of rural industry, especially as Congress, at the session of 1871-2, made liberal provision for its promotion.

The restoration of the primitive abundance of salt and fresh water fish, is perhaps the greatest material benefit 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 quantities, 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. [Footnote: See Ackerhof, Die Nutzung der Seiche und Gewasser. Quedlinburg, 1860.] 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.

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 effected 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 [Footnote: I use WHALE not in a technical sense, but as a generic term for all the large inhabitants of the sea popularly grouped under that name. The Greek kaetos and Latin Balaena, though sometimes, especially in later classical writers, specifically applied to true cetaceans, were generally much more comprehensive in their signification than the modern word whale. This appears abundantly from the enumeration of the marine animals embraced by Oppian under the name , in the first book of the Halieutica.