active 1795-1858 Thomas Wilson

“ Whoever has seen the marshy and boggy land, at times a lake, at others a black tremulous morass, and compared it with the rich drained Polder, its neat and compact farm-house, exhaustless meadows, herds of cattle, and the contented air of its well-to-do proprietor, will at once perceive that whatever might be the evil, unless it were a something truly grievous, so delightful a metamorphosis of a spot doomed by nature to eternal sterility, entailed on man, that evil was fully compensated for by the results obtained towards man’s happiness. ”

“ The question of acclimation is not confined merely to man’s transfer from one country to another, and to his attempts to accommodate himself to the new locality, to the altered circumstances of his adopted country. As civilized man traverses the earth in search of new abodes, he carries with him the arts of social life, and especially the art of agriculture, by which alone he can exist in congregated masses: agriculture, which forms indeed the very basis of civilization. ”

“ Such was the universal corruption of the air, that the pestilence which burst forth in the fifteenth of Justinian, was not checked or alleviated by any difference of the seasons. In time, its first malignity was abated and dispersed; the disease alternately languished and revived; but it was not till the end of a calamitous period of fifty-two years that mankind recovered their health, or the air resumed its pure and salubrious quality. No facts have been preserved to sustain an account, or even a conjecture, of the numbers that perished in this extraordinary mortality. ”

“ I cannot find in the history of any other nation proofs so clear of the beneficial effects of indomitable industry, directed by intelligence, over the welfare and destinies of a people; nowhere do I find evidence so convincing of the great results flowing from the application of practical science to the wants of a people; nowhere do I find to the same extent a sound commercial and political economy, first developed and acted on in Holland, lead so directly to the civilization and welfare of a nation. ”

“ Civilization is the direct result of artificial wants, the gratification of which can alone be met by a free and unrestricted commerce. By violence an empire may be overthrown, and by rapacity its inhabitants may be deprived, not only of their land and property, but even of their natural rights as men, as in India under the administration of England; but all these crusades have no reference whatever to an ameliorating of the condition of mankind; they simply form episodes in the history of the human race, respecting which historians take extremely different views. ”

“ Long resident in a country supposed to be an ague-producing land, I watched with much interest the social condition of a sagacious, prudent, and industrious race of men, who could thus, at one and the same time, preserve their liberty and life from the hostile assaults of furious, implacable tyrants from without, and of an insidious, invisible enemy within, walking stealthily around the habitations of men, poisoning the air of his house, his fields, and gardens. ”

“ A historian whose works I have already quoted on several occasions, and who of all men had perhaps with most profit studied human nature, has remarked that the aspiring genius of Rome sacrificed vanity to ambition, deeming it more prudent to adopt virtue and merit for her own wheresoever they were found, among slaves or strangers, enemies or barbarians. This sacrifice it was easy for the Italian race to make; naturally swarthy, and not unfrequently olive-coloured, they met with no race with whom the Romans might not freely amalgamate. ”

“ Far different is it with modern Europe and her races; follow them to tropical India, Africa, and America, and it will be seen that extinction seems the sure result of all their efforts, whether they unite with the native races or not. If they unite, their purer blood, as we may so call it, soon disappears in the stream of a darker population; if they spurn the union, climate, or as some would term it, malaria, speedily exterminates their race and name. ”

“ To come to later times, the Rhine itself, even in the days of the early Roman emperors, must have been subjugated by the labours of the primitive Batavians, and the revolt of Civilis, with his Batavian legions, testifies as to the energy and intelligence of the race. And now by the patient industry of their descendants, that land, seemingly doomed by nature to be wasted on one side by the turbulent ocean, on the other by the great rivers which traverse it, presents a spectacle unequalled in the world. ”

“ Whether the poison be one or many; whether it be a single species or one of a natural family, does not affect the general conclusions. The diversity of its effects is no proof of diversity in its essential nature or even origin; the living principle is supposed to be of one nature everywhere and for ever; yet see how varied are the results of this principle in moulding the vegetable and animal worlds; how slight are the modifications even in organic elements, which, when called into play, give rise to the most astonishing and unexpected diversity of results. ”

“ Barrack-rooms are not homes. No varied society is to be found there; no amusement, no employment for mind and body; it is man cut off from all human industry and enjoyment; no solace when ill, no comfort under suffering: that young men with unformed constitutions should “die off like flies,”41 need excite no surprise.
To return: to modern science, above all to Liebig, the practical chemist par excellence, we owe the discovery of the true office of ulmine or humus in vegetation; it nourishes the plant before it is in a position to draw its nourishment from the atmosphere. ”

“ The operations of nature when left to herself never vary; they may always be calculated on, foretold, anticipated; on this assured and irrefutable fact all science rests. It is only when man interferes and modifies the elements at work that nature seems to alter her processes; a disturbing agent has been thrust into the machinery, and the mischief it effects must either be counteracted or entirely overcome. So long as the Lake of Haarlem was a lake, or mere, so long were its banks healthy; but drain it partially, and you must be prepared for the result. There is no middle course ”

“ Nature’s great processes go on unaffected: they deteriorate, it is true, by respiration, the superincumbent atmosphere, but not more than any equal amount of animal life. This deterioration the wild plants around, sown by nature herself, speedily removes; the oxygen consumed by savage man and the animal life around, equally wild, is speedily renovated by vegetation, and the oxygen they remove from the atmosphere and the carbonic acid they pour into it, rapidly and constantly recover their equilibrium under the influence of vegetation. ”

“ Men, ever anxious to discover the causes of events, ascribed the origin of the plague in the reign of Justinian to the putrefaction of locusts; but the same event may and has happened without being productive of similar results—without, indeed, causing any disease whatever, as if the poison, though present, were ineffectual unless aided by other circumstances at present unknown to man. Those who have seen cholera only as it prevails on the rotten banks of the Ganges, ascribe its origin to heat and putrefaction, its extension to the habits of a densely-congregated people. ”

“ There are forces in nature against which, with all his industry, he may never be able to prevail. The tropical forest returns upon him the instant, as it were, that he ceases to hew it down, obliterating in an incredibly short time all traces of human labour. The lands of Western France can scarcely be secured from the inroads of the sands driven by western gales towards the interior; the bog is checked only by constant labour, and the hill where once the heath grew spontaneously, can only be retained in a green and grassy condition by the constant watchfulness and labour of men. ”

“ In the first or second chapter of this Essay I ventured to suggest that the discovery of the art to modify the earth, air, and waters of all countries, so as to render them habitable for all mankind, was the grand problem man is now called on to solve. In the construction of the continents of the globe, nature seems to have had in view the formation by centres of life of the living inhabitants of the globe. In these centres she placed forms of life equal to sustain their existence, occasionally aided, at other times unaided, by human industry. ”

“ We never hear of any pestilence, fever, scurvy, dysentery, small-pox, hooping-cough, malignant sore-throat, or other zymotics, originating amongst them. It would, indeed, almost seem that such evils do actually owe their origin to human agency and to human civilization; where civilized man makes his highest endeavours, there his most signal failure occurs; experience teaches him nothing; the insolence of wealth naturally leads to the contempt of all knowledge derived from means otherwise than national and native. ”

“ When a man builds a cottage, a house, or a palace, after duly attending to the surface-drains, he constructs near his dwelling, sometimes beneath it, a cesspool and a dead-well, the former intended to receive the more solid excreta, the latter the soil-water of the kitchen—the water, in fact, used in the domestic economy of the house. If the dead-well or pit dug to receive the soiled water of the house be sufficiently deep, it filters through the soil, and thus requires no clearing out—if not, it overflows the court or garden, and speedily renders the place uninhabitable. ”

“ Thus gradually is formed that humus or ulmine to which agriculturists attach so much importance; that vegetable mould supposed to be the richest of all soils. But where it forms, a kind of putrefaction continually goes on; the soil is influenced deeply as a residence for man. No valetudinarian takes up his abode in the centre of a rich vegetation in hopes of recovering his health and strength, his elastic step, and freedom from lassitude and weariness; he, on the contrary, seeks other regions, where vegetation is scant, humus is not forming, and the soil is never turned over by human industry. ”

“ Whatever historians may say of the antiquity of ancient Rome, the Cloaca Maxima of Servius alone refutes the beautiful romance of Virgil—how Lavinius and Turnus received Æneas ere Rome was; how Romulus and Remus founded Rome, and were succeeded by seven kings, none of whom ever in reality existed. But the existence of the Cloaca Maxima and the researches of the illustrious Niebuhr tell another tale more consonant with what we know of man’s social and physical nature. In the most remote times, man early adopted those measures of self-preservation which nature or simple observation teaches him. ”

“ On the wide ocean and over the absolute desert, the air is always pure, nothing living is decomposing; but watch the mud coasts, and observe the pestilential effects of sea water when suffered to evaporate, or still more when confined to a locality and suffered to decompose. In the ancient world, as in the modern, nature teemed with life, since a cubic inch of the fossil infusoria, contains 41,000 millions of individuals. ”

“ Whether we view man as a native of the land or a stranger, he cannot evade this question; for even as a native and as an individual of a race whose presence on the soil he may inhabit precedes the records of authentic history, if he form a portion of civilized society he receives from his ancestors or predecessors a system he is bound to improve, or at least to maintain, so that he shall live and thrive, not as the beasts of the field, but as a member of a civilized people. ”

“ When vegetation is purely natural, that is when man does not interfere, the growth of plants does not in the least exhaust the soil. Look at the meadow and the virgin forest! Now chemistry explains this, or nearly so. But so soon as man interferes, he must be prepared to undertake the whole labour; if he acts on the earth, the air, and the waters, they will react on him, and sometimes with fearful effect. ”

“ It is singular that the same guano (human) which is said to be so valuable in China, should prove a failure in Europe, and especially in England, showing how much still remains to be discovered in practical agriculture. If human guano really be of such value in China as has been reported, might it not be worth while to import into Britain a few Chinese agricultural labourers and gardeners thoroughly acquainted with the agriculture of their country, and from whom might be learned the art of preparing the manure? Capitalists have engaged in many less promising speculations than this. ”

“ It were foreign to the object of this work to enter more fully into the history of that dissolution of animal structures which forms so important a part of the materials we call manure, destined to restore to the soil that which artificial crops had deprived it of. Every part of animal bodies owes its origin to vegetables or plants, no part being formed by the vital force, and thus all the remains of animals of necessity form manures.
On the management of these, man’s civilization depends; without agriculture there can be no dense population ”

“ Changes inappreciable by human sense and as yet by philosophical instruments, may and no doubt do effect results, to man seemingly contradictory, simply because he comprehends them not. As chemical science makes progress, these differences are being reconciled and understood. Thus, as mere temperature exercises a truly remarkable influence over the nature of the products of fermentation, may it not be the efficient cause of the difference we observe between the malaria of the delta of the Mississippi and that floating near the muddy banks of the Scheldt? ”

“ In this land there was no room—no margin, to use a commercial phrase—for experiments on the pockets and the health of its citizens; they were citizens, not subjects—far-seeing men, who calculated everything d’avance. And now the draining of the lake of Haarlem shows that the race has lost little of its ancient spirit of enterprise and industry, of that applicative invention to the wants of civilized man which gives to Holland and to her colonies an aspect to which no other country bears any resemblance. ”

“ The compounds formed in the bodies of animals and of plants undergo in the air, with the aid of moisture, a series of changes, the last of which are the conversion of their carbon into carbonic acid, of the hydrogen into water, of their nitrogen into ammonia, of their sulphur into sulphuric acid. Thus their elements resume the form in which they can again serve as food for a new generation of plants and animals. Those elements which had been derived from the atmosphere, take the gaseous form, and return to the air; those which the earth had yielded return to the soil. ”

“ Many practical farmers, I am aware, still doubt the facts and theories of chemistry as applied to agriculture; with them I am free to admit that agriculture is not a science as yet, but an experimental art. With this I have nothing to do directly, my object being to show in this chapter in how far civilized man modifies and influences the soil on which he lives. He, the practical farmer, clings to farmyard manure, which he collects in heaps in his farmyard, or by the roadside, exposed to every change of weather, to drenching rains, to summer heat, and winter’s cold ”