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Show 278. course Mother Nature must ever have her fingers in wild wool making corresponding changes in the maintenance of perfect harmony. As he considered evolutionary change in a uniformly evolving environment, he realized the extent of Man's ignorance: Most of the world will always be wild, the sky is - so is the sea and the - kingdom of crystals beneath the mass surface of the ground. Not one in a thousand of the family - are ever seen by men & innumerable animals enjoyed life and became extinct before present greedy man came into existence. He removed these passages from his final draft. These were not to be the issues he discussed, but indicate the kind of thinking which lay behind his argument. Between the writing of "Wild Sheep of California" and "Wild Wool," he had not only watched men hunt mountain sheep at Mount Shasta, he had also spent nearly a year in San Francisco. He gathered valuable experience writing for the San Francisco Bulletin, and tested his ideas against a number of educated urban folk. He was prepared to write about the relationship between Nature and civilization. In particular, he was ready to attack the pastoral ideal, Man's desire to turn earth house hold into a farmyard, his desire to substitute domestic animals for Nature's own. Domestic sheep were, after all, created by Man and represented his best attempt at artificial evolution. What a sorry thing a domestic sheep was when compared to the original |
