Victorian period produced a rich crop of original thinkers and scientific pioneers; there arefew areas of contemporary policy issues or disciplinary specialties whose problem formulations and concerns have not been anticipated, often in remarkably enduring contributions, by some scholar, or sometimes lone amateur, of that era. seminal figure for the modern conservation movement and for the study of ecology and environment is the American George Perkins Marsh (born in Woodstock, Vermont, in 1801), lawyer, linguist, historian, and diplomat-the last of these characterizations having been earned by his more than two decades of service as thefirst US ambassador to the new Kingdom of Italy, from 1861 until his death in 1882. Marsh's most important book, Man and Nature; or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, was published in 1864. In the Preface of this hefty (over 500 pages) volume Marsh described his purpose in terms that suggest the reasons for the book's strong, if delayed, influence on modem scholarship concerning the ecology of the human environment and its impact on environmental activism: The object . . . is to indicate the character and, approximately, the extent of the changes produced by human action in the physical conditions of theglobe we inhabit; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the inorganic world; [and] to suggest the possibility and the importance of restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvement of waste and exhausted regions. importance of population size in determining man's impact on the physical environment underlies much of Marsh 's analysis, but his discussion of the role of demographicfactors is seldom explicit. text reproduced below is excerptedfrom Chapter 1 ofMan and Nature,following the 1st, 1864, edition, published by Charles Scribner in New York. (A modem edition of the book, edited by David Lowenthal, was published in 1965 by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.) In that chapter, Marsh 's main interest is to describe the deterioration affecting the natural endowments of the territories of the former Roman Empire. He links the long-term abuse and overexploitation of the lands of the Mediterranean Basin to numerical decline of the population. Echoing beliefs that weregiven currency by eighteenth century historians, Marsh assumes that human numbers in Roman times were larger, and even much