COUNTY PARKS. 371 



able to Nature's rules of landscape gardening if not to Nature's 

 planting. 



I am aware that at first the right appreciation of a public 

 park might be meager. The first instinct might be to use the 

 park as a convenient source whence to draw one's winter fire- 

 wood, or as a free cow-pasture for the adjoining farmer, but such 

 abuse would soon be rectified when the better idea of public own- 

 ership came to be understood. This leads also to the remark that 

 such parks in the United States are to-day absolutely needed to 

 teach our people the first lessons in forestry; to advise them how 

 and when to cut timber; the economic value of different kinds 

 of trees and the value of woodland as such; the kind of soil 

 which should be left to trees, and such as may be profitably given 

 over to tillage. We are soon as a people to be sent all to school 

 in matters of forestry and arboriculture ; sent to learn the value 

 of the forest in the dear school of experience where we are to be 

 taught the arithmetic of cost. 



In the third place, county parks would tend to preserve to 

 those who come after us something of the primitive beauty of 

 this part of the world as such beauty stood revealed in its original 

 flora. I esteem this from the standpoint of science, and indeed 

 from the standpoint of intellectual progress, a matter of extreme 

 importance. Who can estimate the intellectual stimulus the 

 world receives by the effort made to appreciate and understand 

 the varied wealth of Nature's living forms ? In this direction who 

 can estimate how great has been our own advantage as occupants 

 of this New World ! But such is the aggressive energy of our 

 people, such their ambition to use profitably every foot of virgin 

 soil, that, unless somewhere public reserves be constituted, our 

 so-called civilization will soon have obliterated forever our nat- 

 ural wealth and left us to the investigation of introduced species 

 only, and these but few in number. It is a fact lamented, griev- 

 ously lamented by all intelligent men, that in all the older por- 

 tions of the country, species of plants once common, to say nothing 

 of animals, are now extinct. County parks, if organized soon, 

 would enable us to preserve many of these in the localities where 

 originally found. 



The objection to all this is that such parks as here broached 

 are impracticable. Such objection can lie in two directions only : 

 (1) the lack of suitable sites, and (2) the lack of suitable control. 

 As to the first, it may be said that in a great number of our coun- 

 ties, especially eastward, such sites exist and have in many cases 

 been long used, and it must be confessed abused, by our people. 



Everywhere, even in the prairie States, there are " caves " and 

 "dens" and "fords" and " backbones " and "springs" long popu- 

 larly named and to some extent enjoyed, places of picnic, ex- 



