1895.] ESSAYS. 105 



is to bring down the fiasco of Ecleu with the certainty and promptness 

 with which a stone falls to the earth. And laws for proper care of 

 the beauties of nature should certainly be vividly enough inscribed in 

 the hearts of men to render superfluous the ghastly signs, " Keep 

 off the Grass," " No Trespassing," "Beware the Dog." 



It was my privilege to visit, during the past summer, a number of 

 renowned gardens ; places where men have done all in their power to 

 provide everything that can minister to love of nature and beauty, 

 and to the needs of science, and special and popular education. My 

 purpose has been not so much to see everything contained in these 

 gardens as to find out what sort of ideas and ideals men have been 

 developing with regard to this most important subject; and, more 

 than this, to discover as far as possible to what degree these gardens 

 are fulfilling their mission of elevating taste and advancing science. 

 A garden, like everything else that has any legitimate purpose in the 

 world, must be for man and not man for a garden. If an institution, 

 be it church, school, garden or factory, is constituted on the stilted 

 ideas, false principles, or delusions of some one individual, it may 

 drag out a painful existence for a time and do a gfeat deal of harm ; 

 but all such things must die out and give way to things that fill the 

 genuine needs of a healthy humanity. Nature has constituted this 

 world a magnificent garden, with hundreds of thousands of kinds of 

 plants and animals in it, all living in such relations to one another 

 that the greatest amount of life and happiness possible is pro- 

 duced. Her endless variety is so skilfully massed and arranged that 

 individuals or species are either not conspicuous or possess some 

 charm and dignity. Some good man with a narrow and decided 

 taste lays out a garden or a park. He has a penchant for some one 

 tree or perhaps for yellow flowers. He indulges this yellow taste to 

 such an extent that people organized on a liking for other and more 

 subdued colors will be driven to distraction by a brief sojourn in his 

 garden. Or a pedantic science may dominate the arrangement of a 

 garden. Distinctions, of use in the science for certain purposes, but 

 altogether provisional, temporary and artificial, are set up as though 

 they actually belonged in nature. The result is a stilted, manufactured 

 affair, with which nature or the love of nature has nothing to do. 



Speaking of botanical gardens I do not wish to confine myself 

 strictly to lines which an infant science has set up. It has been said 

 by eminent entomologists that insects have actually called into being 

 our highly colored and perfumed flowers. These mutual relations 

 between plant and insect life constitute at once the most important 



