human
The elevations of the earth's surface provide for it a perpetual renovation. The higher mountains suffer their summits to be broken into fragments, and to be cast down in sheets of massy rock, full of every substance necessary for the nourishment of plants. These fallen fragments are again broken by frost and ground by torrents into various conditions of sand and clay--materials which are distributed perpetually by the streams farther and farther from the mountain's base. Every shower which swells the rivulets enables their waters to carry certain portions of earth into new positions, and exposes new banks of ground to be mined in their turn. The turbid foaming of the angry water--the tearing down of bank and rock along the flanks of its fury--these are no disturbances of the kind course of nature; they are beneficent operations of laws necessary to the existence of man, and to the beauty of the earth; ... and each filtering thread of summer rain which trickles through the short turf of the uplands is bearing its own appointed burden of earth to be thrown down on some new natural garden in the dingles below.
gpt
From the gizzard mills of the earthworm to the great earth mills of the sea, all are--most evidently--parts of one great system.