4 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE 



may, however, be perfectly assured that he had reasons, and 

 most excellent ones, and a little study of these may be inter- 

 esting and profitable. 



In the process of the development of mankind there has 

 been noticeable a constantly increasing tendency toward 

 differentiation and specialization, each step in the process 

 being a slow one, and, as a rule, taken at first by some man 

 or group of men trained in some other line. In this way have 

 come about many new forms or fields of work, each adapted 

 more or less from others of a previous and perhaps lesser 

 civilization. Each new profession, or branch from an older 

 one, demanded and received a new cognomen. This process 

 of differentiation has developed more or less clearly defined 

 groups of men, as, for example, the professions of the ministry, 

 medicine, law, civil engineering, architecture and so on. 



Fifty years ago, when Mr. Olmsted began his landscape- 

 work, there was beginning to be a demand in this country for 

 men to do a certain line of work that was intrinsically quite 

 different from that previously carried on by either the archi- 

 tect, the engineer or the gardener, and yet work that embod- 

 ied some of the principles heretofore utilized by all of these 

 men. Here was this great tract of land, now known as Cen- 

 tral Park, to be developed and made beautiful, for the purpose 

 of providing the crowded millions of the great city of the 

 future with the opportunity "for a form of recreation to be 

 obtained only through the influence of pleasing natural 

 scenery upon the sensibilities of those quietly contemplating 

 it." This was a new problem for this country, and indeed 

 for any country, for none of the great parks in Europe now 

 utilized for this purpose were originally created for anything 

 of this sort. They are chiefly the result of developing land 

 that had originally been set aside as hunting forests by the 

 great nobles or rulers of Europe. 



I think it will be generally conceded that New York was 

 fortunate in its selection of the master mind to work out this 

 problem, and that Central Park has been most successfully 

 designed and executed. Mr. Olmsted saw clearly the great- 

 ness of the task and the differentiation of this form of design 

 from that of the architect or engineer and certainly from the 

 work of the gardener. He chose to call himself a landscape 

 architect. Let us, therefore, look into the meaning of these 

 words and see whether they are not well selected and worthy 

 of our respect and of general adoption. 



