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About The Book : The first command addressed to man by his Creator, and substantially repeated to the second great progenitor of our race, not only charged him to subdue the earth, but gave him dominion over all terrestrial creatures, Whether animate or inanimate, and thus predicted and prescribed the subjugation of the entire organic and inorganic World to human control and human use. Of the primitive races of man, known to ancient sacred and profane history, but one, the Bedouin Arab, has retained unchanged his original mode of life, and the camel alone, by those remarkable properties, which have made habitable by men regions inaccessible to the improvements of civilization, has preserved to our own times that second act in the great drama of social life, the patriarchal condition. The Arab in all his changes of faith, heathen, christian, mussulman, has remained himself immutable; and the student of biblical antiquity must thank the camel for the lively illustrations of scripture history presented by the camp of the Ishmaelite sheikh, who is proud of his kindred with the patient Job, and who boasts himself the lineal descendant of Ibrahim el Khaleel, or Abraham, “the friend " of God. About The Author : George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), an American diplomat and philologist, is considered by some to be America's first environmentalist and by recognizing the irreversible impact of man's actions on the earth, a precursor to the sustainability concept, although "conservationist" would be more accurate. The Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Vermont takes its name, in part, from Marsh. His 1864 book Man and Nature had a great impact in many parts of the world. He was an admirer of the Goths, whose presence he traced in whatever is great and peculiar in the character of the founders of New England. He owned the finest collection of Scandinavian literature outside of Scandinavia. Part of it ultimately became the property of the University of Vermont, through the liberality of Frederick Billings. During the winter of 1858/9 he began a course of thirty lectures on the English language at Columbia University, and a year later he delivered a second course, on the grammatical history of English literature, before the Lowell Institute, in Boston. Marsh played a role in the creation of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary by acting as Coordinator of the American readers.