434 . FOREST CONSERVATORIES. 



and the few driveways constructed should commence and 

 terminate at the house of the superintendent, to be closed 

 with a gate, and designed only for cartways and for the 

 accommodation of invalids, not for recreation or amuse- 

 ment. A high fence, or a fence of any kind, would be 

 useless. The beauty of the outside of a wood is greatly 

 injured by a fence. The public should always enjoy the 

 pleasure of beholding an unenclosed forest, which a per- 

 son may enter on foot at any point and at any time. 



By this proposal, I recommend no luxurious place of 

 resort for wealthy men, who may pass their summers here 

 in enjoyments from which others are excluded. A clause 

 should be inserted into the charter of the institution that 

 would render such diversion from the original object of the 

 place an impossibility. The charter should be such that no 

 man should be able to buy privileges which are not gra- 

 tuitously offered to every individual of the community. 

 We must consider that a place of this kind would offer 

 no temptation to the classes who frequent fashionable 

 resorts. As classes, neither the fashionable nor the vulgar 

 would feel any special interest in it ; but to certain indi- 

 viduals from every class of society these grounds would 

 afford continual pleasure and recreation. 



It may be objected that the time has not yet come for 

 an enterprise of this kind ; that the country is not yet 

 sufficiently divested of wood to render such conservatories 

 necessary for the purposes designed by them. It is ad- 

 mitted that we cannot pass over five miles of any road in 

 New England without meeting with large fragments of 

 wild wood, and assemblages of trees in some places of suffi- 

 cient extent to be called forests. But these woods are 

 liable at any time to be destroyed by the owner, who is not 

 expected to preserve them a day after it is plainly for his 

 interest to fell them. Whenever a tract of forest is cleared, 

 the animals of all kinds that harbored there are expelled. 



