390 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 39 



I have preached enough. The problem is most difficult. The 

 country is awakening, we hope, to a belated appreciation of its pre- 

 cious birthright, now largely wasted. Lovers of birds and mammals 

 have made the right start. Lovers of the rare and scientifically most 

 significant plants urge that all rare native species be given a real 

 chance. 



The few out of thousands of instances of destruction of or im- 

 minent threat to our rarest and often choicest native plants above 

 noted are unfortunately wholly typical. The problems are not 

 merely for Virginia or Maine or Quebec. They concern us all. The 

 layman and the practical developer of roads, farms, clearings, deep- 

 ditching, and draining of ponds and swamps know nothing of them 

 and, if they did, it is not probable that they would consider the 

 conservation of a few rare plants as counterbalancing the more 

 "practical" demands of so-called progress. When nature is in the 

 way it seems, as already noted, to be man's passion to conquer her. 

 From earliest times his two proudest boasts have been his mastery 

 over nature and his resemblance to God, who must often be ashamed 

 of the resemblance. I have heard self-styled sportsmen in Virginia 

 argue against protection of ducks and other shore birds, saying: 

 "God made them for us to kill ; why shouldn't we do what he wanted 

 us to do?" If this is the correct doctrine, then we should make all 

 haste to kill the shore birds and with them the rarest of plants. 

 Might it not be better, however, to take the opposite line of reason- 

 ing? If God (working through unhampered nature) preserved the 

 rarer and biologically often the most significant of plants and ani- 

 mals until the Nordics came to America to kill them out, is it not 

 clear that their complete destruction was not a part of the original 

 scheme? The extermination of many of them has already been 

 complete. Isolated and tiny colonies of others still occasionally 

 persist. It is surely the part of wisdom and of consideration for 

 our descendents for our boasted civilization to see that something 

 besides the commonplace and the economically immediately useful 

 is left in our flora and fauna for them to study and enjoy. In sym- 

 pathetically preserved large tracts, like some of the national parks, 

 this is possible, and in some of them the obligation is, happily, rec- 

 ognized. Furthermore, on the splendid old plantations along the 

 James and other southern rivers many unspoiled tracts of woodland 

 and marsh are preserving their native plants intact. But is there 

 any hope for the small and isolated pockets here and there amidst 

 cultivated fields and pig and cow pastures? I introduce the ques- 

 tion. Let us all think, and think hard, until some wise solution of 

 the problem is found. 



