er hope to be--who used to consider natural Theology as useless,
fallacious, impossible; on the ground that this Earth did not reveal the
will and character of God, because it was cursed and fallen; and that its
facts, in consequence, were not to be respected or relied on. This, I
was told, was the doctrine of Scripture, and was therefore true. But
when, longing to reconcile my conscience and my reason on a question so
awful to a young student of natural science, I went to my Bible, what did
I find? No word of all this. Much--thank God, I may say one continuous
undercurrent--of the very opposite of all this. I pray you bear with me,
even though I may seem impertinent. But what do we find in the Bible,
with the exception of that first curse? That, remember, cannot mean any
alteration in the laws of nature by which man's labour should only
produce for him henceforth thorns and thistles. For, in the first place,
any such curse is formally abrogated in the eighth chapter and 21st verse
of the very same document--"I will not again curse the earth any more for
man's sake. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and
heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease." And next: the
fact is not so; for if you root up the thorns and thistles, and keep your
land clean, then assuredly you will grow fruit-trees and not thorns,
wheat and not thistles, according to those laws of nature which are the
voice of God expressed in facts.

And yet the words are true. There is a curse upon the earth: though not
one which, by altering the laws of nature, has made natural facts
untrustworthy. There is a curse on the earth; such a curse as is
expressed, I believe, in the old Hebrew text, where the word
"_admah_"--correctly translated in our version "the ground"--signifies,
as I am told, not this planet, but simply the soil from whence we get our
food; such a curse as certainly is expressed by the Septuagint and the
Vulgate versions: "Cursed is the earth"--[Greek text]; "in opere tuo,"
"in thy works." Man's work is too often the curse of the very planet
which he misuses. None should know that better than the botanist, who
sees whole regions desolate, and given up to sterility and literal thorns
and thistles, on account of man's sin and folly, ignorance and greedy
waste. Well said that veteran botanist, the venerable Elias Fries, of
Lund:--

"A broad band of waste land follows gradually in the steps of
cultivat