These changes for evil and for good have not been caused by great natural revolutions of the globe, nor are they by any means attributable wholly to the moral and physical action or inaction of the peoples, or, in all cases, even of the races that now inhabit these respective regions. They are products of a complication of conflicting or coincident forces, acting through a long series of generations; here, improvidence, wastefulness, and wanton violence; there, foresight and wisely guided persevering industry. So far as they are purely the calculated and desired results of those simple and familiar operations of agriculture and of social life which are as universal as civilization--the removal of the forests which covered the soil required for the cultivation of edible fruits, the drying of here and there a few acres too moist for profitable husbandry, by draining off the surface waters, the substitution of domesticated and nutritious for wild and unprofitable vegetable growths, the construction of roads and canals and artificial harbors--they belong to the sphere of rural, commercial, and political economy more properly than to geography, and hence are but incidentally embraced within the range of our present inquiries, which concern physical, not financial balances. I propose to examine only the greater, more permanent, and more comprehensive mutations which man has produced, and is producing, in earth, sea, and sky, sometimes, indeed, with conscious purpose, but for the most part, as unforeseen though natural consequences of acts performed for narrower and more immediate ends.
The exact measurement of the geographical changes hitherto thus effected is, as I have hinted, impracticable, and we possess, in relation to them, the means of only qualitative, not quantitative analysis. The fact of such revolutions is established partly by historical evidence, partly by analogical deduction from effects produced in our own time by operations similar in character to those which must have taken place in more or less remote ages of human action. Both sources of information are alike defective in precision; the latter, for general reasons too obvious to require specification; the former, because the facts to which it bears testimony occurred before the habit or the means of rigorously scientific observation upon any branch of physical research, and especially upon climatic changes, existed.
