{257a} 'A broad belt 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 the 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.