Proenvirokment in the Evolution of Man 635 



was of the roughest and most desolate kind consisting largely 

 of sand hills, gravel pits, soil heaps, and weedy banks. 



His previous experience, or in other words his stored nerve 

 stimuli, obtained from many and diverse stimulation centers; 

 also his appreciation of the good and bad points of many exist- 

 ing botanic gardens; his desire to plan out the best results 

 for the space at his disposal; his aim to suit the area and details 

 to the most active period of teaching; and as in most human 

 enterprises to achieve the results at a certain cost; represented 

 each a resultant mental stimulus, that was built up of many 

 separate sensory stimuli. 



These separate resultants were all gradually linked up or 

 combined into a definite plan or picture that became a pro- 

 environal effort toward the aim in view, and that anticipated 

 even the gradual material growth of the decade that was to 

 follow. The lakes, the valleys, the quiet shaded walks, the 

 shrub groups, the beds of natural plant families, the ferneries, 

 the rock-garden, the bryarium, and the greenhouses, all took 

 clear shape as to size, relation, value, color-effect, and sci- 

 entific usefulness, while as yet desolate wastes were around. 



Within two years many of the details had become accom- 

 plished and correlated results; within a decade most of them 

 could be looked on. But even now, after a lapse of more than 

 twenty years, a few items in that proenvironal aspiration 

 remain unmaterialized except on paper, or in the writer's 

 mind. 



Throughout the years the mental proenvironal picture re- 

 mained as a continuous resultant response that gradually 

 worked to, and worked out, one main result. Throughout 

 the same period also the writer had been endeavoring to ex- 

 plain the *' betterment" principle which many evolutionists 

 had noted, but had failed like himself in getting a key to. This 

 summated proenvironal effort seemed to explain alike the 

 gradually more simplified resultant acts in lower animals and 

 in plants, as well as, and even more strikingly, the gigantic 

 hand, eye, and mind efforts of man as witnessed in the pyra- 

 mids, the Parthenon, the Colosseum, the cathedrals, and the 



