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Show 277 THE USES OF WILD WOOL Muir was not done with the subject of wild sheep. A year later he wrote "Wild Wool," probably the best ecological argument of his career. Its subtle and intricate strategy was the result of serious wrestling with Darwinian issues, as the heavily revised manuscript shows. The theme of the essay, stated squarely in its middle, had been foremost in Muir's consciousness for nearly ten years. No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding the relations which culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Now he could begin to discuss this issue in Darwinian terms, and his early draft shows that he carefully integrated his own view of Nature as flow with hard-headed Darwinian theory. When he attempted to account for the combination of hair and wool on the hide of a wild sheep, he found himself swept into cosmic issues. He wrote in an early draft: The entire universe is in a state of change - flowing like a river. The circumstances of a sheep's life food, climate, the mountains over which it roams, its friends, & enemies, etc., change imperceptibly from generation to generation & from day to day; & so of |