diness of human toil, intent
only (as in the too exclusive cultivation of the sugar-cane and of
the cotton-plant) on present profits, without foresight or care for
the future, the lands of warmer climates will surely fall under that
curse, so well described by the venerable Elias Fries, of Lund.
{257a}

'A broad belt of waste land follows gradually in the steps of
cultivation. If it expands, its centre and its cradle dies, and on
the outer borders only do we find green shoots. But it is not
impossible, only difficult, for man, without renouncing the
advantage of culture itself, one day to make reparation for the
injury which he has inflicted; he is the appointed lord of creation.
True it is that thorns and thistles, ill-favoured and poisonous
plants, well named by botanists "rubbish-plants," mark the track
which man has proudly traversed through the earth. Before him lay
original Nature in her wild but sublime beauty. Behind him he
leaves the desert, a deformed and ruined land; for childish desire
of destruction or thoughtless squandering of vegetable treasures has
destroyed the character of Nature; and, terrified, man himself flies
from the arena of his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to
barbarous races or to animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin
beauty smiles before him. Here, again, in selfish pursuit of
profit, and, consciously or unconsciously, following the abominable
principle of the great moral vileness which one man has expressed--
"Apres nous le deluge"--he begins anew the work of destruction.
Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave the East, and perhaps the
Deserts formerly robbed of their coverings: like the wild hordes of
old over beautiful Greece, thus rolls the conquest with fearful
rapidity from east to west through America; and the planter now
often leaves the already exhausted land, the eastern climate becomes
infertile through the demolition of the forests, to introduce a
similar revolution into the far West.'

For a couple of miles or more we trotted on through this jungle,
till suddenly we saw light ahead; and in five minutes the forest
ended, and a scene opened before us which made me understand the
admiration which Humboldt and other travellers have expressed at the
far vaster Savannas of the Orinoco.

A large sheet of gray-green grass, bordered by the forest wall, as
far as the eye could see, and dotted with low bushes, weltered in