NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 75 



closets and full gardens and fat. But what did they 

 look like*? What was their form? How were the 

 things planted*? Not in "curious knots" yet in 

 beds; what were these like? What was their arrange- 

 ment? Or, to reduce all these questions to one, what 

 were their garden designs? 



Garden making is a primitive art; nothing, indeed, 

 antedates it as an occupation, whatever one's favored 

 authority may be. So we may confidently say that 

 it was in making garden that man first gave expres- 

 sion to himself. All must have hunted the Diplod- 

 ocus and defended themselves from the Anoplothe- 

 rium which was not so very fierce, after all, they say 

 or from those frightful ancestors of the hyena that 

 could grind up the bones of the ancestors of our bears 

 and lions even as the bull pup chews a chicken wing to- 

 day, in very much the same way. But when it came to 

 clearing away the forest and shaping a field, here was 

 chance for variation; and ever increasing opportunity 

 for more and more variation, as the earth was grad- 

 ually subdued. 



It is in the form of his garden, therefore, that man 

 has always been, and is, and always will be, most 

 self-revealing. He is utterly unable to be anything 

 else. There is something within each one of us that 

 shapes actually, not figuratively the work of our 

 hands; a something that directs all the delicate forces 



