ght about, that no
compensatory production of new life, except that of man himself and
his distorted "breeds" of domesticated animals, has accompanied the
destruction of formerly flourishing creatures, and that, so far as we
can see, if man continues to act in the reckless way which has
characterised his behaviour hitherto, he will multiply to such an
enormous extent that only a few kinds of animals and plants which
serve him for food and fuel will be left on the face of the globe. It
is not improbable that even these will eventually disappear, and man
will be indeed monarch of all he surveys. He will have converted the
gracious earth, once teeming with innumerable, incomparably beautiful
varieties of life, into a desert--or, at best, a vast agricultural
domain abandoned to the production of food-stuffs for the hungry
millions which, like maggots consuming a carcase, or the irrepressible
swarms of the locust, incessantly devour and multiply.

Another glacial period or an overwhelming catastrophe of cosmic origin
may fortunately, at some distant epoch, check the blind process of
destruction of natural things and the insane pullulation of humanity.
But there are, it seems probable, many centuries of what would seem to
the men of to-day deplorable ugliness and cramping pressure in store
for posterity unless an unforeseen awakening of the human race to the
inevitable results of its present recklessness should occur. Whatever
may be the ultimate fate of the earth under man's operations, we
should endeavour at this moment to delay, as far as possible, the
hateful consummation looming ahead of us.

It is interesting to note a few instances of man's destructive action.
Even in prehistoric times it is probable that man, by hunting the
mammoth--the great hairy elephant--assisted in its extinction, if he
did not actually bring it about. At a remote prehistoric period the
horses of various kinds which abounded in North and South America
rapidly and suddenly became extinct. It has been suggested, with some
show of probability, that a previously unknown epidemic disease due to
a parasitic organism--such as those which we now see ravaging the
herds of South Africa--found its way to the American continent. And it
is quite possible that this was brought from the other hemisphere by
the first men who crossed the Pacific and populated North America.

To come to matters of certainty and not of speculation, we know that
man by clearing t