Nature is the exterior throne of God’s glory.  The man who studies and contemplates it rises gradually towards the interior throne of omniscience.  Made to adore the Creator, he commands all the creatures.  Vassal of heaven, king of earth, which he ennobles and enriches, he establishes order, harmony, and subordination among living beings.  He embellishes Nature itself; cultivates, extends, and refines it; suppresses its thistles and brambles, and multiplies its grapes and roses.

Look upon the solitary beaches and sad lands where man has never dwelt:  covered—­or rather bristling—­with thick black woods on all their rising ground, stunted barkless trees, bent, twisted, falling from age; near by, others even more numerous, rotting upon heaps already rotten,—­stifling, burying the germs ready to burst forth.  Nature, young everywhere else, is here decrepit.  The land surmounted by the ruins of these productions offers, instead of flourishing verdure, only an incumbered space pierced by aged trees, loaded with parasitic plants, lichens, agarics—­impure fruits of corruption.  In the low parts is water, dead and stagnant because undirected; or swampy soil neither solid nor liquid, hence unapproachable and useless to the habitants both of land and of water.  Here are swamps covered with rank aquatic plants nourishing only venomous insects and haunted by unclean animals.  Between these low infectious marshes and these higher ancient forests extend plains having nothing in common with our meadows, upon which weeds smother useful plants.  There is none of that fine turf which seems like down upon the earth, or of that enameled lawn which announces a brilliant fertility; but instead an interlacement of hard and thorny herbs which seem to cling to each other rather than to the soil, and which, successively withering and impeding each other, form a coarse mat several feet thick.  There are no roads, no communications, no vestiges of intelligence in these wild places.  Man, obliged to follow the paths of savage beasts and to watch constantly lest he become their prey, terrified by their roars, thrilled by the very silence of these profound solitudes, turns back and says:—­

Primitive nature is hideous and dying; I, I alone, can make it living and agreeable.  Let us dry these swamps; converting into streams and canals, animate these dead waters by setting them in motion.  Let us use the active and devouring element once hidden from us, and which we ourselves have discovered; and set fire to this superfluous mat, to these aged forests already half consumed, and finish with iron what fire cannot destroy!  Soon, instead of rush and water-lily from which the toad compounds his venom, we shall see buttercups and clover, sweet and salutary herbs.  Herds of bounding animals will tread this once impracticable soil and find abundant, constantly renewed pasture.  They will multiply, to multiply again.  Let us employ the new aid to complete our work; and let the ox, submissive to the yoke, exercise his strength in furrowing the land.  Then it will grow young again with cultivation, and a new nature shall spring up under our hands.