DEC 19 1SG3 



NATURAL SCIENCE: 



A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress. 



No. 22. Vol. III. DECEMBER. 1893. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS. 



A National Trust for Places of Beauty and Interest. 



WE learn from the Daily Neu's that a movement which may turn out 

 to be of some importance was started at the rooms of the Commons 

 Preservation Society on November i6. It has long been felt that 

 the nation is in the way of losing some of its most valuable pos- 

 sessions through the want of some custodian to whom they may be 

 readily transferred, and by whom they will be jealously guarded. 

 Districts celebrated for their natural beauty are by degrees marred 

 and disfigured ; houses and ruins of unique interest are destroyed, 

 because, passing from hand to hand, they some day come into the 

 ownership of persons unable to appreciate them, or forced to realise 

 any money value they may have. Within the last two years, such 

 noteworthy spots as the top of Snowdon, the island in the middle of 

 Grasmere Lake, and the Lodore Falls have come into the market, and 

 might not improbably have been permanently secured for the public en- 

 joyment had some body capable of acquiring and protecting them in 

 the public interest been in existence. We have also noticed with grief 

 the quarrying operations that are carried on along the Cheddar Clift's 

 — the grandest inland cliffs in this country — as if there were not 

 abundance of the Mountain Limestone to be obtained elsewhere in 

 the neighbourhood. Local authorities can hardly at present be 

 expected to help the public to preserve the beauty of its great 

 pleasure grounds ; their area of action and the sources from which 

 they draw their funds are, as a rule, too contracted, and they have 

 many claims upon their not too ample resources. But apart from 

 local authority there is absolutely no body which can hold and 

 manage places of beauty and interest on behalf of the public ; for 

 the existing open space societies are not corporate bodies and exist 

 rather to influence public opinion than to hold property. This want 

 it is now proposed to meet. Canon Rawnsley, the Vicar of Keswick, 



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