448 CONFERENCE OF DELEGATES 



so unobtrusively as to escape the attention of those whose aesthetic feelings 

 outweigh their acquaintance with the factors that condition wild life. 

 Local societies will, however, be able to meet criticism by reminding those 

 who bring it that neglect to regulate the factors which condition wild life 

 may mean a sacrifice of that life more to be regretted, because the cruelty 

 involved is more refined and more prolonged, than the destruction caused by 

 those unsympathetic barbarians who find the fact of their rarity a sufficient 

 incentive to the slaughter of rare creatures and the uprooting of rare 

 plants. 



Local societies will sometimes find, and as time goes on will do so more 

 often, that the agencies inimical to wild life in their own areas have become 

 so powerful that the establishment of a ' sanctuary ' is impracticable, and 

 that the only means of conserving the wild life once characteristic of the 

 neighbourhood is to acquire a suitable site and convert this into an ' asylum ' 

 for such plants, insects, and birds known to have at one time been native 

 there, as can be placed in or attracted to the ' asylum.' The question is 

 sometimes asked whether and, if so, how far it is permissible to treat a 

 ' nature reserve ' as both a ' sanctuary ' and an ' asylum.' The answer 

 must be left to the judgment of individual local societies : the only practical 

 general consideration is the bearing of the decision on ownership. A 

 ' sanctuary ' is no longer such when access to it ceases to be strictly limited, 

 whereas an ' asylum for wild life ' must be at least as freely open to the 

 public as ' a place of natural beauty.' Its accessibility to the public should 

 prevent the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves from accepting 

 ownership of any ' asylum for the conservation of local wild life ' ; its artificial 

 origin should preclude the National Trust from doing so. 



Another question sometimes raised is whether, and how far, a collection 

 of plants representative of a local area may be appropriately included in a 

 ' public garden.' In this case the answer is simple : provided the local 

 authority owning and maintaining the ' public garden ' can be persuaded 

 by its local society to permit the collection of local plants to be treated as 

 a distinct section of the establishment, the suggestion, ideal in itself, has the 

 added advantage of solving the otherwise difficult question of ownership, 

 since this would be vested in the appropriate ' local authority.' This 

 suggestion is one which may be appropriately considered at a conference in 

 York because, although it be true that York as a county has been and still 

 is backward in its efforts to assist the National Trust to preserve English 

 amenities, it is also the case that certain Yorkshire towns have been, and are 

 still, singularly public-spirited in the support they have given to the main- 

 tenance of their public gardens. It should therefore be an easy task for 

 local societies to persuade their own local authorities to follow what is 

 already a recognised policy and, when establishing public gardens, to devote 

 one section of these gardens to the purposes of ' an asylum for local wild 

 life.' If Yorkshire should lead, other counties would follow. 



In connection with the question of establishing, wherever possible, a 

 series of ' asylums for local wild life ' it may be possible for local societies 

 to render the cause we have at heart a further service. Since such an 

 asylum must be, on a small scale, a combined zoological and botanical garden, 

 there must of necessity be vivaries and nurseries attached. In these 

 vivaries and nurseries can easily be raised not only all the material required 

 for the maintenance of the collections in the ' asylum,' but also all the 

 material required by the teachers of nature study and their pupils in the 

 local schools. It may well be that on a local society may fall the burden of 

 collecting the funds required, not only for the establishment but also for 

 the maintenance of an ' asylum for wild life.' But this task accomplished, 



