IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 93 



Again, such parks as are here discussed are an educational 

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

 the esthetic side of life as on that which is more strictly sani- 

 tary. How few of our land-owners, 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 for comment for miles 

 in either direction. 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 esthetic 

 sense now vainly seeks appeasement, we should have a country 

 rich in groves conformable to nature's rules of landscape 

 gardening if not to nature's planting. 



I am aware that at the first the right appreciation of a public 

 park might be meagre. The first instinct might be to use the 

 park as a convenient source whence to draw one's winter fire- 

 wood, or as a free cow-pasture for the adjoining farmer, but 

 such abuse would soon be rectified when the better idea of pub- 

 lic ownership came to be understood. This leads also to the 

 remark that such parks in Iowa are to-day absolutely needed 

 to teach our people the first lessons in forestry; to advise them 

 how and when to cut timber; the economic value of different 

 kinds of trees and the value of woodland as such; the kind 

 of soil which should be left to trees and such as may be profit- 

 ably given over to tillage. We are soon as a people to be sent 

 all to school in matters of forestry and arboriculture: sent to 

 learn the value of the forest in the dear school of experience 

 where we are to be taught the arithmetic of cost. 



In the third place county parks would tend to preserve to 

 those who come after us something of the primitive beauty of 

 this part of the world, as such beauty stood revealed in its 

 original flora. I esteem this from the standpoint of science, 

 and, indeed, from the standpoint of intellectual progress, a 

 matter of extreme importance. Who can estimate the intel- 

 lectual stimulus the world receives by the effort made to 

 appreciate and understand the varied wealth of nature's living 

 forms? In this direction who can estimate how great has been 

 our own advantage as occupants of this new world? But such 

 is the aggressive energy of our people, such their ambition to 

 use profitably every foot of virgin soil that, unless somewhere 



