no THE TANGANYIKA PROBLEM. 



independent of the natural environment of forest trees, but 

 who acted in a persistent manner, clearing away the bushes 

 and brambles off the lawns, in which he planted great 

 trees and little trees, so that their limbs and foliage could 

 grow luxuriantly and be seen. Moreover, in England, 

 when such a park has once been formed by the agency of 

 man, it is absolutely necessary that the operations of the 

 gardener shall go on and continue, or the park will 

 inevitably and quickly lose its artificial characters. Thorns 

 and briars and bushes will quickly spring up upon the 

 grass, and in a few years the park will have gone back 

 again to what we are accustomed here to regard as a 

 state of nature ; or, in other words, it will have become 

 converted into a trackless waste of old and young jungle. 

 In England or Europe a park-land is thus an artificial 

 product, and is an impossibility, unless there is someone 

 ready and willing to hold the natural tendencies of the 

 vegetation in check. In tropical Africa, on the other hand, 

 precisely the same floral arrangement is produced, but no 

 human agency has had anything to do with it ; and the 

 existence of these natural park-lands presents us with a 

 ready-made and an extraordinary puzzle, which it is 

 interesting to try to understand. 



In attempting to account for the appearance of park- 

 lands, the most natural supposition to make is, of course, 

 that of inequality of dampness or character of the soil, 

 which is sufficient to allow some kinds of trees to orow in 

 one place, some in another, and grass in between ; but 

 although this view of the matter looks very nice and 

 promising at first sight, its value is absolutely destroyed 

 by the facts of the case. I have on several occasions, 

 when in a park-land, set my men to trench and dig in 

 different directions, and then examined the soil, with the 



