Dispersal

“ The dispersal, immediate, determined, sustained and universal, throughout the unopened territories of the planet, is the paramount issue challenging the spirit and resources of the privileged prosecutors of the Ten-Year Plan in the course of the current year. ”

“ The old teachings as to the part played by the important factors of change of climate and scarcity of food, and the theory of Polar dispersal, are quite discarded, and the author's main contention is that "the grand centre of Life's dispersal across the globe is an equatorial one, and that, from those regions where the greatest stability of climate and the most favourable conditions for the development of animal and vegetable forms are to be found, Life in two grand streams has flowed towards the poles." ”

“ It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could only be explained on the supposition that species gradually become modified; and the subject haunted me. But it was equally evident that neither the action of the surrounding conditions, nor the will of the organisms (especially in the case of plants) could account for the innumerable cases in which organisms of every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life—for instance, a woodpecker or a tree-frog to climb trees, or a seed for dispersal by hooks or plumes. ”

“ Full easily may the stream of my life run itself out ere the overflow of the forest stream may subside. And indeed it were not impossible that more and more of the flood may force itself between you and yonder forest, until you are cut off from the rest of the world in such sort that your fishing-boat may not suffice to carry you across. Then the dwellers on the continent beyond, giving themselves up to their own pleasures and cares, may entirely forget you in your old age. ”

“ The fields suddenly become infertile, the towns lose their inhabitants, the roads grow to be impassable, the canals are choked up, the rivers break down their banks, the sea itself swallows up the land. ”

“ The DEPRESSION of a region hastens its old age by decreasing the gradient of streams, by destroying their power to excavate their beds and carry their loads to a degree corresponding to the amount of the depression, and by lessening the amount of work they have to do. The slackened river currents deposit their waste in Hood plains which increase in height as the subsidence continues. The lower courses of the rivers are invaded by the sea and become estuaries, while the lower tributaries are cut off from the trunk stream. ”

“ In this flat country, large rivers, that scarce had declivity enough to run, crept slowly along, through meadows of fat black earth, stagnating in many places as they went, rolling an abundance of decayed vegetables, and filling the whole air with exhalations of the most corrupt and putrid kind. ”

“ His obedient Afreets toiled on, denuding the plateaux of their soil, washing it away from every slope and peak, pouring it year by year into the cañons, and whirling it on to the ocean. The rivers, the brooklets, the springs, and the rains all joined in this eternal robbery. Little by little an eighth of a continent was stripped of its loam, its forests, its grasses, its flowers, its vegetation of every species. What had been a land of fertility became an arid and rocky desert. ”

“ What would not grow? There are rivers that Western-American irrigators would smack their lips over, a light but assured rainfall, a rich loam soil, and millions of acres of pasture untouched save by wallaby and kangaroo. Yet we still cry out that the world is over-full. ”

“ The sea roars against your harbourless cliffs—you have to build the breakwater, and dig the port of refuge; the unclean pestilence ravins in your streets—you have to bring the full stream from the hills, and to send the free winds through the thoroughfare; the famine blanches your lips and eats away your flesh—you have to dig the moor and dry the marsh, to bid the morass give forth instead of engulphing, and to wring the honey and oil out of the rock. ”

“ Whether the stream shall be a curse or a blessing, depends upon man's labour, and administrating intelligence. For centuries after centuries, great districts of the world, rich in soil, and favoured in climate, have lain desert under the rage of their own rivers ”

“ In France, Spain, and Germany, rivers have brimmed over their banks, torrents have rushed from the high lands, canals have burst their embankments; land-marks are swept away, and corn and seed-fields are turned into stony deserts. ”

“ He, in his wisdom, foresaw the time would come, when the exhausted soil, and crumbling institutions, and crowded homes of the old world, would require a new field for its overgrown population, and held this world perdu beneath the ocean caves until the fitting moment. When the hour had come, it arose fresh and blossoming from the sea, adorned with a goodly variety of mountain, lake, fair plain, and noble river, to compensate the lonely wanderer for the home he has been forced to leave. ”

“ This unfortunate condition is partly accounted for by the nature of the land, broken by ravines, mountain torrents, lakes, and marshes, and bristling with hedges or earth-works which make a sort of citadel of every field; without roads, without canals, and at the mercy of prejudices which scorn our modern agriculture. ”

“ With the ebb and flow of industry and manufactures, villages, towns and cities spring up like mushrooms. Others have disappeared like the melting snow-flakes. The forest vanishes and the sea is encroached upon. Holland reclaims a lost country, America reanimates a desert. Rivers and lakes are dried up and mountains are hewn down. ”

“ The stream which, rightly directed, would have flowed in soft irrigation from field to field,—would have purified the air, given food to man and beast, and carried their burdens for them on its bosom—now overwhelms the plain, and poisons the wind, its breath pestilence, and its work famine. ”

“ It is like some river that is composed of two affluents, one of which rises away up in the mountains, and is fed by the eternal snows; the other springs on the plain somewhere, and is but the drainage of the surface-water, and when hot weather comes, and drought is over all the land, the one affluent is dry, and only a chaos of ghastly white stones litters the bed where the flashing water used to be. ”

“ But unknown to these simple peasant-folk, still further rigours of nature were slowly preparing themselves. As the generations passed, the waters of the vast and unplumbed ocean wasted slowly away; enriching the air and the desiccated soil, but sinking lower and lower each century. ”

“ But if uncommon rains above occasion a continuance of the rise till all the waters meet over the summits of the banks, then the motion of that in the river is communicated to the stagnant water on the plains, a general current takes place, and instead of a depositum left, the former soil is swept away to the ocean, and famine ensues that year. ”

“ Everywhere, over all the broad surface of the planet, a wail of despair arose from the perishing millions, beaten down by the water that poured from the unpitying sky. Even on the highlands the situation was little better than in the valleys. The hills seemed to have been turned into the crests of cataracts from which torrents of water rushed down on all sides, stripping the soil from the rocks, and sending the stones and bowlders roaring and leaping into the lowlands and the gorges. ”

“ Throughout the completely evolved man of the far distant future, the deep and broad river will have overflowed all its banks, it will have inundated and completely overwhelmed the animal-human nature of the individual through whom it flows, as the whole volume of the vast reservoir pours itself out. ”

“ The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert. ”

“ A storm flushing the rivers, a dry spring, the smallest cloud, the slightest sunbeam that marred the crops laid thousands of human beings low, involving agonies of starvation, a sudden and general rise of prices, and periods of awful anguish, during which men browsed like brute beasts on the grass of the ditches. ”

“ Having now satisfied ourselves that there goes on all over the world an incessant waste of the solid lands, that the disintegrated debris is washed down by rains and transported seawards by rivers, and that the waves are ever eating their way into the iron-bound coast-line as well as into the low alluvial shore, we naturally come to ask the result and end of all this decay. ”

“ The seasons bring their floods, and the mountain torrents create their gullies; but the water escapes into the sea, and the labourer brings his produce, as best he may, amidst the rocks and sand and mud which the cataracts have left behind them. ”

“ This equable and uniform production is like a stream that is fed by ten thousand springs and many affluents; it flows steadily on, calm, perennial, beneficent: but our speculative and spasmodic production is too much like a mountain-river, that at one season comes down in a flood and deluges the land, at another subsides into a rivulet, and all the land is parched. ”

“ So came, so passed, before the drowsy gaze of that strange attenuated fraction of humanity which scantily peopled the waters and margins of the great river to win from it the bare elements of livelihood or transit, winning them at a death-rate not far below the immigrant's and in a vagabondage often as wild as that of the water-fowl passing unseen in the upper darkness. ”

“ At present, this species of inundated land offers no inconvenience to the people, except in the production of miasm, and even that, perhaps, becomes too much diluted with the atmosphere to produce mischief before it reaches the settlements on the borders of the prairie. Hence the inference is correct, that our inundated lands present fewer obstacles to the settlement and growth of the country, and can be reclaimed at much less expense, than the swamps and salt marshes of the Atlantic States.
2. River Bottoms or Alluvion. The surface of our alluvial bottoms is not entirely level. ”

“ The desolate appearance it presents—the miserable homes of the population, devoid of every ornament, without comfort or plenty in their appearance—the stinted and sparse crops, the intervening deserts of sand, the waste of desolation, spreading away far as the eye can reach—the streams contemptible in comparison, and the squalid, degraded, thriftless people along their banks, make it painful to the beholder, who is borne on his way in some dirty little craft, contrasting so strangely with the Mississippi steamer. ”

“ That night people who lived on the high rocky bluffs did not envy the owners of the rich bottom-lands, who saw their wealth submerged, and who could not know what trick the waters would play upon them. ”

“ This whole question of irrigation and dry farming, this or that phase of the last scrambling, feverish settling on the last lands, was sorely wasteful of human enterprise and human happiness. It was much like the spawning rush of the salmon from the sea. Many perish. A few survive. ”

“ For the truth is, the majority of those who "live on the river," as the phrase goes, have the reputation of being pilferers; farmers tell sad tales of despoiled chicken-roosts and vegetable gardens. From fishing, shooting, collecting chance driftwood, and leading a desultory life along shore, like the wreckers of old they naturally fall into this thieving habit. ”

“ The state of transition also appears in marshes, bogs, and ponds, which, but for the interference of man, would many ages ago have been filled up with decayed forests and the remains of undisturbed vegetation. Rivers thus become agents of the NEVER-CEASING CREATION, and a means of giving greater equality to the face of the land. The sea, as it retired, either abruptly from some situations, or gradually from others, left dry land, consisting of downs and swelling hills, disposed in all the variety which would be consequential on a succession of floods and ebbs during several thousand years. ”

“ The dwellers in a land whose soil was every year newly manured by nature, which brought forth abundantly almost without labour, must very soon have abandoned a pastoral life for agriculture, and in consequence have acquired fixed abodes and settled possessions. But the yearly inundation compelled them also at an early period to protect their flocks from the water, to secure their habitations, to observe the periods of the rising and falling of the stream. The long duration of the overflow made it necessary to provide for the support of man and beast. ”

“ Within 200 years, it may be—for we must allow for backwashes and cross-currents which will retard the flow of the stream—the hideous new towns which disfigure our landscape may have disappeared, and their sites may have been reclaimed for the plough. ”

“ But now, as we note the bold outline of the basin, and watch the lines worked by the waters ages and ages since, still as distinct as though made last year, we see with our own eyes fresh proofs that we are in a new country, that the meadows about us, cleared by our fathers, are the first that have lain on the lap of the old earth, at this point, since yonder bank was shaped by the floods. ”

“ There the overflow is astonishing, for no sooner has the 439 water reached the upper part of the banks than it rushes out and overspreads the whole of the neighboring swamps, presenting an ocean overgrown with stupendous forest-trees. So sudden is the calamity that every individual, whether man or beast, has to exert his utmost ingenuity to enable him to escape from the dreaded element. ”