expressed, I believe, in the old Hebrew text, where the word
"_admah_"--correctly translated in our version "the ground"--signifies,
as I am told, not this planet, but simply the soil from whence we get our
food; such a curse as certainly is expressed by the Septuagint and the
Vulgate versions: "Cursed is the earth"--[Greek text]; "in opere tuo,"
"in thy works." Man's work is too often the curse of the very planet
which he misuses. None should know that better than the botanist, who
sees whole regions desolate, and given up to sterility and literal thorns
and thistles, on account of man's sin and folly, ignorance and greedy
waste. Well said that veteran botanist, the venerable Elias Fries, of
Lund:--

"A broad band of waste land follows gradually in the steps of
cultivation. If it expands, its centre and its cradle dies, and on the
outer borders only do we find green shoots. But it is not impossible,
only difficult, for man, without renouncing the advantage of culture
itself, one day to make reparation for the injury which he has inflicted:
he is appointed lord of creation. True it is that thorns and thistles,
ill-favoured and poisonous plants, well named by botanists rubbish
plants, mark the track which man has proudly traversed through the earth.
Before him lay original nature in her wild but sublime beauty. Behind
him he leaves a desert, a deformed and ruined land; for childish desire
of destruction, or thoughtless squandering of vegetable treasures, has
destroyed the character of nature; and, terrified, man himself flies from
the arena of his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to barbarous
races or to animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin beauty smiles
before him. Here again, in selfish pursuit of profit, and consciously or
unconsciously following the abominable principle of the great moral
vileness which one man has expressed--'Apres nous le Deluge,'--he begins
anew the work of destruction. Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave