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IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



they attract us away from all that is sordid and petty and mean, and 

 lead us to more quiet and peaceful thoughts to the love of living. It 

 is the sign of the sound spiritual and intellectual health of our people 

 that the number of those who thus use the natural world in esthetic 

 fashion, for their individual good and uplift, is ever increasing; and the 

 effort to establish parks, to maintain our native bits of woodland groves, 

 the cleanness of our streams and fields, makes by no means unheeded 

 appeal to these. 



Again, there are very many among us who realize the value of pleasure 

 grounds, play grounds, open air commons as institutions purely sanitary. 

 Such may or may not have sympathy with those people just described who 

 love beauty and life and nature for its own sake; but they know that 



Railroad improvement along the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad at Ames. 



such things are after all right, right for all the people. They know that a 

 speedway, fifteen or twenty miles, along the Des Moines or Cedar river, 

 a speedway, where the tired man of business may for an hour or two in 

 the evening whirl along amid the trees, or past points overlooking the 

 fertile fields, or may let his eye, as the sun goes down, rest upon the 

 far flashing softened lights of the winding river — they know that this 

 makes for the good health and consequent success of the man who is 

 called upon to determine the fortunes not of himself and friends alone, but 

 in large measure, also of the city, the community entire. Nor less do 

 such people appreciate the value of such a roadway to the plain people; 

 to the bicycler with his wheel; the clerk, the teacher, the boy with his 

 pony cart, the mother and her children; the laborer who for a little sits 



