210 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



which might have adapted themselves to the new condi- 

 tions had the change gone on very slowly, from gaining a 

 footing. Hence it is that the cultivated fields and the 

 artificial grass lands are less flowery than our hedge- 

 bordered fields and old pastures, while the railway banks 

 never exhibit such displays of floral beauty as they often 

 do with us. An American writer in The Cenhiry for 

 June, 1887, summarises the general result of these varied 

 causes, with a severe truthfulness that would hardly be 

 courteous in a stranger, in the following words : — 



" A whole huge continent has been so touched by human 

 hands, that over a large part of its surface it has been 

 reduced to a state of unkempt, sordid ugliness ; and it can 

 be brought back into a state of beauty only by further 

 touches of the same hands more intelligently applied." 



Let us hope that intelligence of this kind will soon be 

 cultivated as an essential part of education in all American 

 schools. This alone will, however, have no effect so long 

 as the fierce competition of great capitalists, farmers and 

 manufacturers, reduces the actual cultivator of the soil, 

 whether owner, tenant, or labourer, to a condition of sordid 

 poverty, and a life of grinding labour which leaves neither 

 leisure nor desire for the creation or preservation of natural 

 beauty in his surroundings.^ 



Floral Bccmty in England and America. 



Although with the limited opportunities afforded by one 

 spring and summer spent in America, it is impossible to 

 speak with certainty, yet both from my own observation, 

 and from information received from residents in various 

 parts of the Eastern States, it seems to me, that in no 

 part of America, east of the Mississippi, is there such a 

 succession of floral beauty and display of exquisite colour as 

 are to be found in many parts of England. Such, for 

 instance, are the woods and fields of daffodils, " which come 



1 American periodicals are full of accounts and illustrations of the 

 poverty and hard lives of the small farmers. See, in The Arena of 

 July, the article by Handin Carland, A Prairie Heroine, and the same 

 writer's volume, Blain Travelled Roada, 



