Underwood and Underwood.
MAN’S WONDERFUL TRIUMPH OVER NATURE
By irrigation the arid desert of California has been made to blossom as the rose in the luxurious orange groves of Riverside. These views show the desert, the method of irrigation, and the result of man’s labour.
LARGER IMAGE
How Man is Levelling the Earth
The idea of great, lasting, conclusive qualitative variations in different parts of the earth is mythical. Neither the Garden of Eden nor the land of Eldorado belongs to reality. There is no country whose soil bestows wondrous strength upon man or an exuberance of fruitfulness upon woman. In India precious stones are as little apt to grow out of the cliffs as silver and gold are likely to exude from fissures in the earth. Nor is there any basis for the slighter differences between the Old World and the New which the philosophers of history of the eighteenth century believed they had discovered. The opinion that the New World produces smaller plants, less powerful animals, and finally a feebler humanity, was not unconditionally rejected by even Alexander von Humboldt. The degeneration and wasting away of the American Indians would certainly be a less disgraceful phenomenon could it be attributed to some great natural law instead of to the injustice, greed, and vices of the white men. In the course of development of the European daughter-nations in America we cannot recognise any such great and universal distinction. The course of history in America, just as in corresponding periods of time in Northern Asia, in Africa, and in Australia, only confirms the belief that lands, no matter how distant from one another they may be, whenever their climates are similar, are destined to be scenes of analogous historical developments.
It is certain that, so far, one of the greatest results of the labour of man has been the levelling and overcoming of natural differences. Steppes are made fertile through irrigation and manuring; the contrast between open and forest land becomes less and less—indeed the destruction of forests is being far too rapidly and widely carried out—the acclimatisation of men, animals, and plants causes variations to disappear more and more as time passes. We can look forward to a time when only such extremes as mountains and deserts will remain—everywhere else the actions of the earth will be equalised. The process by which this is carried out may be described shortly. Man, in spite of all racial and national differences, is fundamentally quite as much of a unity as the soil upon which he dwells; through his labour more and more of this character of unity is transmitted to the earth, which, as a result, also becomes more and more uniform.
History from Heaven to Earth
One of the most powerful of the ties by which history is bound to Nature is that of its dependence on the ground. At the first glance any given historical development is involved with the earth only—the earth upon which the development takes place. But if we search deeper we shall find that the roots of the development extend even to the fundamental principles of the planetary system. By this it is not meant that every history must be founded on a cosmological basis, that it must begin with the creation, or, at least, with the destruction of Troy, as was once thought necessary; but it is certainly safe to say that a philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and then descend to the earth, filled with the conviction that all existence is fundamentally one—an indivisible conception founded from beginning to end on an identical law.