The work which we are noticing aspires to and rightly claims a foremost place among the literary productions of America, despite a certain homely flavor and a certain unpretending way which its author has of saying things which are really great and fine.  The main thought illustrated is not new, but it is brought out so forcibly, and illustrated by such encyclopedic learning, that it has the power of novelty.  Mr. Marsh shows, as many before him have done, that man is now using the organic and inorganic forms of the earth in a manner so subsidiary to the might of his intellect and his will, that such obstacles as mountains and seas, which used to impede him hopelessly, now are his auxiliaries; but he does more than this:  he demonstrates the destructive and annihilating sway of man over the world in the past and in the present; and, proceeding from the historic fact that the countries which in the palmy days of the Roman Empire were the granary and the wine-cellar of the world have been given over by the improvident destructiveness of man to desolation and desert, he enters into a thorough study of the fact, that, no sooner does man recede from the barbaric state than he commences a career of destructiveness, cutting off, in a manner reckless and criminally wasteful, forests, the lives of quadrupeds, birds, insects, and in short every living thing excepting the few domestic animals which follow him and serve him for companionship or for food.  Mr. Marsh shows, with more than prophetic insight, with the mathematical logic of facts, that, unless compensations far more general and adequate than have yet been devised are provided, the destructive propensities of civilized man will convert the world into a waste.  Some of our readers have paused thoughtfully over that chapter in “Les Miserables” which deals so grimly with the sewerage of cities, and details with the faithfulness of an historian the exhausting demands of those conduits which carry untold millions to the sea, and waste that aliment of impoverished soils which not all the science of the age has found it possible to restore; but Mr. Marsh, not drawing single pictures with so strong lines, spreads a broader canvas, and compels his reader to equal thoughtfulness.  To quote but one instance is enough.  We have in America thus far escaped, and as singularly as fortunately, the importation of the wheat-midge which has been the scourge of the grain-fields of Europe:  it will, doubtless, some time be a passenger on our Atlantic ships or steamers; it will commence its work; and then man has the task of importing its natural antagonists, of promoting their spread, and so of compensating the evil.  The work which we are noticing abundantly shows, that, if man were not in the world, the natural compensations which the Divine Being has introduced would produce perfect harmony in all things; that man, from his first stroke at a tree, his first slaying of a beast or bird, introduces an element of disorder which he can compensate only after civilization has reached a height of which we yet know nothing, and of which our present civilization gives us but the suggestion.