blood-red (really "blood-red," since the colour was due
to the same blood-crystals which colour our own blood) with the swarms
of a delicate little worm like the earth-worm, which has an
exceptional power of living in foul water, and nourishing itself upon
putrid mud. In old days I have stood on Hungerford Suspension Bridge
and seen the mud-banks as a great red band of colour, stretching for a
mile along the picture when the tide was low. In smaller streams,
especially in the mining and manufacturing districts of England,
progressive money-making man has converted the most beautiful things
of nature--trout streams--into absolutely dead corrosive chemical
sewers. The sight of one of these death-stricken black filth-gutters
makes one shudder as the picture rises, in one's mind, of a world in
which all the rivers and the waters of the sea-shore will be thus
dedicated to acrid sterility, and the meadows and hill-sides will be
drenched with nauseating chemical manures. Such a state of things is
possibly in store for future generations of men! It is not "science"
that will be to blame for these horrors, but should they come about
they will be due to the reckless greed and the mere insect-like
increase of humanity.

* * * * *

In the destruction of trees and all kinds of plants man has
deliberately done more mischief than in the extermination of animals.
By inadvertence he has completely abolished the strange and remarkable
trees and shrubs of islands--such as St. Helena--where the herbivorous
animals introduced by him have made short work of the wonderful native
plants isolated for ages, and have completely exterminated them, so
that they are "extinct." We have just had the opportunity of studying
one of the few oceanic islands--"Christmas Island" (forty square miles
in area)--untouched by man until thirty years ago. It lies 200 miles
south of Java. Its native inhabitants, plants and animals were
carefully examined, and specimens secured twenty years ago. There were
then no human inhabitants, and the island was rarely visited. It was,
however, about twelve years ago handed over by its proprietors to some
thousand Chinamen to dig and ship the 15,000,000 tons of valuable
"phosphate" (at a profit of a guinea a ton), which forms a large part
of its surface. And now from time to time we shall have reports of
this result of contact with man, and through him with all the plagues
and curses of the gr