IMPROVING NATURE 205 



Thames Valley, or Dartmoor, or the coast of Corn- 

 wall, or North Wales, or the Highlands, simply to 

 enjoy the Natural Beauty. And railway companies 

 and the Governments of Canada, Australia, and 

 New Zealand think it worth while to spend large 

 sums of money in publishing pictures of the beauty 

 of the countries in which they are interested in order 

 to attract holiday-makers or home-seekers to them. 

 And here, as in other cases, man now is not 

 content to be an impassive spectator and to be 

 entirely controlled by his surroundings. He does 

 not allow the " crustal relief" to have the upper 

 hand in the matter. He will not admit that all he 

 has to do is to adapt himself to his surroundings. 

 That servile view of our position in the Universe is 

 fast departing. We are determined to have the 

 ascendancy. And much as we admire the Beauty 

 of the Earth we set about improving it. We fail 

 disastrously at times, I allow. But sometimes un- 

 consciously, and sometimes deliberately, we succeed. 

 We have in places made the Earth more beautiful 

 than it was before we came, and we have certainly 

 shown the possibility of this being done. From 

 what I have seen in uninhabited countries I can 

 realise what the river-valleys of England must have 

 been like before the arrival of man beautiful, 

 certainly ; but not so beautiful as now. They must 

 have been an unrelieved mass of forest and marsh. 

 Now the marshes are drained and turned into golden 

 meadows. The woods are cleared in part and well- 

 kept parks take their place, with trees specially 

 selected, pruned, and trim, and made to stand out 

 well by themselves so that their umbrageous forms 



