e world he inhabits. Mr. Marsh takes his readers very
much by surprise; for few are aware, we apprehend, that in the course of
his wandering life, and while prosecuting his eminent philological
studies, he has made leisure enough to survey the natural sciences with
critical exactness, pursue an extended course of inquiry into physical
phenomena, note and digest the results of Italian, Spanish, English,
French, German, Dutch, and American naturalists, ply every guide and
ploughman, every driver and forester, every fisherman and miner, every
lumberman and carpenter, for the results which men attain by observing
within the narrow circle of their occupation,--and weave all into a
copious work which subordinates all results to a grand psychological
law, the mastery of man's mind over the world it calls its home.

The work which we are noticing aspires to and rightly claims a foremost
place among the literary productions of America, despite a certain
homely flavor and a certain unpretending way which its author has of
saying things which are really great and fine. The main thought
illustrated is not new, but it is brought out so forcibly, and
illustrated by such encyclopedic learning, that it has the power of
novelty. Mr. Marsh shows, as many before him have done, that man is now
using the organic and inorganic forms of the earth in a manner so
subsidiary to the might of his intellect and his will, that such
obstacles as mountains and seas, which used to impede him hopelessly,
now are his auxiliaries; but he does more than this: he demonstrates the
destructive and annihilating sway of man over the world in the past and
in the present; and, proceeding from the historic fact that the
countries which in the palmy days of the Roman Empire were the granary
and the wine-cellar of the world have been given over by the improvident
destructiveness of man to desolation and desert, he enters into a
thorough study of the fact, that, no sooner does man recede from the
barbaric state than he commences a career of destructiveness, cutting
off, in a manner reckless and criminally wasteful, forests, the lives of
quadrupeds, birds, insects, and in short every living thing excepting
the few domestic animals which follow him and serve him for
companionship or for food. Mr. Marsh shows, with more than prophetic
insight, with the mathematical logic of facts, that, unless
compensations far more general and adequate than have yet been devised
are pr