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Show 279. article, Muir thought. Apparently men were in great danger when they cast their lot with the work of their own hands. If quantity of wool on a domestic sheep was more important than the quality, if the quality of life it represented in comparison to the wild sheep was ignored, then Muir suspected that men were defrauding themselves. He would write an argument which cut through social Darwinist issues, straight to the center of Man's true relationship to Nature. What men did reflected upon themselves, and they were finally creating themselves when they meddled with Nature. If a sheep was any indication, Man's work had been degrading for himself and his charges. Darwin praised sheep breeders in The Origin of Species - "... what English breeders have actually effected is proved by the enormous prices given for animals with a good pedigree . . ." - but this was hardly Muir's criterion of worth. The highest pedigree would always be owned by the wildest animal. Nevertheless Muir used a Darwinian argument when he put a value on Nature's ability to create and maintain the attributes needed in a changing environment. Doing so, he followed the path of many of Agassiz's students, away from their first master. Agassiz had insisted to the end that "wild species remain, so far as we have been able to discover, entirely unchanged, - maintained, it is true, in their integrity by the circumstances established for their support, but never altered by them." Thus Agassiz and all pre-Darwinian thinkers could not show the value of Nature to Man's agriculture. Muir could. The secret to agriculture would be the principles of adaptation which |