370 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



highest ideal is industry; the highest accomplishment, speed. 

 Our rural population is wearing itself out in an effort to outwear 

 " labor-saving machinery." If you do not believe it, take a 

 journey across the country anywhere through Iowa or Illinois 

 and see how the people are actually living. They know no law 

 but labor, their only recreation is their toil. Now it is needless 

 to say how abnormal all this is. We are as a people entrapped in 

 our machines and are by them ground to powder. The effect of 

 it is apparent already in the public health and will be the most 

 startling factor in the tables studied by the man of science in the 

 generations following. Not to paint too darkly the picture, at- 

 tention may be called to the fact that rural suicides are not un- 

 common, and that the wives of farmers are a conspicuous element 

 in the population of some of our public institutions. There must 

 be something done to remedy all this, to preserve for our people 

 their physical and mental health ; and to this end, as all experi- 

 ence shows, there is nothing so good as direct contact with 

 Nature, the contemplation of her processes, the enjoyment of her 

 peaceful splendor. If in every county, or even in every township, 

 there were public grounds to which our people might resort in 

 numbers during all the summer season a great step would be 

 taken, as it seems to me, for the perpetuation, not to say restora- 

 tion, of the public health. We are proud to call ourselves the 

 children of " hardy pioneers," but much of the hardiness of those 

 pioneers was due to the fact that they spent much of their time, 

 women, children, and all, out of doors. All the land was a vast 

 park in which that first generation roamed and reveled. They 

 breathed the air of the forest, they drank the water of springs, 

 they ate the fruit of the hillsides, plum thickets were their 

 orchards, and all accounts go to show that hardier, healthier, or 

 happier people never lived. Such conditions can never come 

 again, but we may yet by public grounds for common enjoyment 

 realize somewhat of the old advantage. 



Again, such parks as are here discussed are an educational 

 necessity. Our people as a whole suffer almost as much on the 

 aesthetic side of life as on that which is more strictly sanitary. 

 How few of our landowners, for instance, have any idea of 

 groves or lawns as desirable features of their holdings ! If in any 

 community a farm occurs on which a few acres are given over to 

 beauty, the fact is a matter of comment for miles in either direc- 

 tion. A county park well kept and cared for would be a perpetual 

 object lesson to the whole community ; would show how the rocky 

 knoll or deep ravine on one's own eighty- acre farm might be 

 made attractive, until presently, instead of the angular maple 

 groves with which our aesthetic sense now vainly seeks ap- 

 peasement, we should have a country rich in groves conform- 



