460 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



ment has led in the West. It has, by its encouragement of home- 

 stead plantations, greatly modified the landscape of the vast 

 central prairie region of our continent, "What was an endless 

 and monotonous sea of grass is now a great procession of ever- 

 changing vistas between groups of trees. It has resulted in our 

 Government's establishing fifty-three reservations containing 

 sixty-two million acres of public forests managed by an efficient 

 department, in establishing state forest commissions and reser- 

 vations, in the formation of national, state and local forestry 

 associations, many of which give quite as much attention to the 

 forest as an element of beauty in landscape and to the preserva- 

 tion of roadside growth and encouragement of public and private 

 tree-planting for beauty alone, as they do to the economic prob- 

 lems. In Massachusetts such an association secured laws plac- 

 ing all town roadside growth in charge of a Tree Warden. The 

 importance of a centralized, instead of the individual property- 

 owner's control, of street trees is receiving general recognition. 

 Mr. Wm. F. Gale, the City Forester of Springfield, Mass., by his 

 enlistment of school children as street tree defenders, has shown 

 how centralized control may greatly stimulate individual 

 interests. 



A little later in this period there began to flow from the pens 

 of such men as Hamilton Gibson, Bradford Torrey, John Bur- 

 roughs, John Muir, and Ernest Thompson Seton, a literature that 

 has drawn the people so close to nature that they are seeing and 

 feeling keenly the beauty of the common things right about 

 them, and drawing away from the meagerness, garishness, and 

 conventionality of the lawns and lawn planting of the period that 

 followed the decline of the rich, old-fashioned garden of our 

 grandmothers, and began with the vulgar "bedding-out" craze 

 that followed displays at the Philadelphia Centennial. Then 

 came the World's Fair at Chicago, where many men of many 

 arts worked earnestly in harmony, as they had never done be- 

 fore, to produce an harmonious result. This bringing together 

 of artists in the making of the Fair, gave a tremendous impetus 

 to civic and village improvement activities, in common with all 

 others. 



The American Park and Outdoor Art Association, organized 

 in Louisville in 1897, and giving special attention to the public 



