174 NATURAL HISTORY BULLETIN'. 



hardiness of those pioneers was due to the fact that they spent 

 much of their time, women, children and all, out of doors. All 

 the land was a vast park in which that first generation roamed 

 and reveled. They breathed the air of the forest, they drank 

 the water of springs, they ate the fruit of the hillsides where 

 plum-thickets were the orchards, and all accounts go to show 

 that hardier, healthier or happier people never lived. Such 

 conditions can never come again, but we may yet by public 

 grounds for common enjoyment realize somewhat of the old 

 advantage. 



Again such parks as are here discussed are an educational 

 necessity. Our people as a whole suffer almost as much on 

 the esthetic side of life as on that which is more strictly sani- 

 tary. How few of our land-owners, for instance, have any 

 idea of groves or lawns as desirable features of their hold- 

 ings. If in any community a farm occurs on w'hich a few 

 acres are given over to beauty the fact is a matter of 

 comment for miles in either direction. A county park well- 

 kept and cared for would be a perpetual object lesson to the 

 whole community, would show how the rocky knoll or deep 

 ravine on one's own eighty-acre farm, might be made attract- 

 ive, until presently, instead of the angular maple groves with 

 which our esthetic sense now vainly seeks appeasement, we 

 should have a country rich in groves conformable to Nature's 

 rules of landscape-gardening if not to Nature's planting. 



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

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

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

 w^ood, or as a free cow-pasture for the adjoining farmer, but 

 such abuse would soon be rectified when the better idea of pub- 

 lic ownership came to be understood. This leads also to the 

 remark that such parks in Iowa 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 profit- 

 ably given over to tillage. We are soon as a people to be 



