within the power of man irreparably to derange the combinations of
inorganic matter and of organic life, which through the night of aeons
she had been proportioning and balancing, to prepare the earth for his
habitation, when in the fulness of time his Creator should call him
forth to enter into its possession.

Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic
world are, as I have remarked, bound together by such mutual relations
and adaptations as secure, if not the absolute permanence and
equilibrium of both, a long continuance of the established conditions of
each at any given time and place, or at least, a very slow and gradual
succession of changes in those conditions. But man is everywhere a
disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature
are turned to discords. The proportions and accommodations which insured
the stability of existing arrangements are overthrown. Indigenous
vegetable and animal species are extirpated, and supplanted by others of
foreign origin, spontaneous production is forbidden or restricted, and
the face of the earth is either laid bare or covered with a new and
reluctant growth of vegetable forms, and with alien tribes of animal
life. These intentional changes and substitutions constitute, indeed,
great revolutions; but vast as is their magnitude and importance, they
are, as we shall see, insignificant in comparison with the contingent
and unsought results which have flowed from them.

The fact that, of all organic beings, man alone is to be regarded as
essentially a destructive power, and that he wields energies to resist
which Nature--that nature whom all material life and all inorganic
substance obey--is wholly impotent, tends to prove that, though living
in physical nature, he is not of her, that he is of more exalted
parentage, and belongs to a higher order of existences, than those which