§ 1. The question of acclimation is not confined merely to man’s transfer from one country to another, and to his attempts to accommodate himself to the new locality, to the altered circumstances of his adopted country. As civilized man traverses the earth in search of new abodes, he carries with him the arts of social life, and especially the art of agriculture, by which alone he can exist in congregated masses: agriculture, which forms indeed the very basis of civilization. Whether we view man as a native of the land or a stranger, he cannot evade this question; for even as a native and as an individual of a race whose presence on the soil he may inhabit precedes the records of authentic history, if he form a portion of civilized society he receives from his ancestors or predecessors a system he is bound to improve, or at least to maintain, so that he shall live and thrive, not as the beasts of the field, but as a member of a civilized people. When a hunting tribe of North American Indians, a horde of Bedouins, or Hottentots or Caffres, a Turcoman family, or a gipsy encampment, a Cape Boer, or an Australian sheep-farmer, sit down by stream, or valley, or lake, they no more influence the soil than a troop of antelopes or buffaloes. Nature’s great processes go on unaffected: they deteriorate, it is true, by respiration, the superincumbent atmosphere, but not more than any equal amount of animal life. This deterioration the wild plants around, sown by nature herself, speedily removes; the oxygen consumed by savage man and the animal life around, equally wild, is speedily renovated by vegetation, and the oxygen they remove from the atmosphere and the carbonic acid they pour into it, rapidly and constantly recover their equilibrium under the influence of vegetation. Thus, neither the earth (soil), air, nor water, is in any way influenced by his presence, nor is he in general affected by these; there is no reciprocal influence for good or bad: he cuts down no forests, grows no wheat, or but little, makes no canals, drains no marsh-lands, poisons no rivers; the refuse of his dwellings, the excreta of such a population, are not sensibly perceived, even if allowed to rot and waste away on the surface--a practice prevalent with most if not all wild and uncultivated people; it rapidly disappears, disintegrated by processes in which the lower forms of animal life take a part. Now, contemplate the picture civilized man presents, and see him in direct antagonism with nature! The plants of nature’s sowing are rudely torn up with the plough and destroyed, the fields are forced to yield crops by which he lives, and what he takes from the soil must, to use the language of chemists, “be restored to it:” the excreta of man and animals, the refuse of dwellings, the deteriorated and poisoned liquids, the products of manufactories, are collected into heaps, to rot on the surface of the soil, before being dug into it; or are thrown