elied on. This, I was told, was the doctrine of
Scripture, and was therefore true. But when, longing to reconcile
my conscience and my reason on a question so awful to a young
student of natural science, I went to my Bible, what did I find? No
word of all this. Much--thank God, I may say one continuous
undercurrent--of the very opposite of all this. I pray you bear
with me, even though I may seem impertinent. But what do we find in
the Bible, with the exception of that first curse? That, remember,
cannot mean any alteration in the laws of nature by which man's
labour should only produce for him henceforth thorns and thistles.
For, in the first place, any such curse is formally abrogated in the
eighth chapter and twenty-first verse of the very same document--"I
will not again curse the earth any more for man's sake. While the
earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and
winter, day and night shall not cease." And next, the fact is not
so; for if you root up the thorns and thistles, and keep your land
clean, then assuredly you will grow fruit-trees and not thorns,
wheat and not thistles, according to those laws of Nature which are
the voice of God expressed in facts.

And yet the words are true. There is a curse upon the earth, though
not one which, by altering the laws of nature, has made natural
facts untrustworthy. There is a curse on the earth; such a curse as
is expressed, I believe, in the old Hebrew text, where the word
"adamah" (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]; "in opere tuo," as the Vulgate has it--"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 f