378 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIV. No. 1133 



and of the general character of urban life at 

 present, it would seem that the type of recrea- 

 tion most urgently needed by the majority of 

 people to-day is to be found in the open coun- 

 try. The relatively abrupt changes coincident 

 with modern civilization have seriously inter- 

 fered with the fine adjustments acquired by 

 the human body in the course of long ages; 

 and the modern business man, who may be re- 

 garded as the final and typical product of these 

 changes, can now obtain rest in its fullest 

 sense only by resorting for several weeks in 

 the year to the open country or mountains. 

 There he may find entire relief from the 

 nerve-racking drive of city life, and be 

 brought once more into contact with primitive 

 conditions. There he may have an oppor- 

 tunity of reawakening his dormant faculties 

 and of " resetting " his physical " tone," by 

 effecting a readjustment of physiological inter- 

 relations. One of the greatest needs of city 

 dwelling people is to develop objective inter- 

 ests; "to get out of themselves," as the phrase 

 goes; and a frequently effectual means to this 

 end is a keen interest in outdoor things, en- 

 couraging, as it must, a healthy manner of 

 living, an unconfined habit of observation, 

 and a mood unaffected by the nervous ten- 

 sion so peculiar to town life. 



If this be true, it follows that the best recre- 

 ative elements in nature are those which most 

 infallibly tend to revive our atrophied facul- 

 ties and instincts. Among them the following 

 are important. First: either perfect quiet, or 

 an absence of all save primitive and natural 

 sounds, such as those caused by the wind in 

 the trees, by running or falling water, or by 

 singing birds. Second: landscapes that relieve 

 the eyes from close work by offering distant 

 views, quiet harmonies of color, and a quies- 

 cent atmosphere, varied by occasional touches 

 of movement in such objects as running or 

 falling water, scurrying squirrels, or birds in 

 flight. Third: accessible mountains, which 

 encourage climbing and allow the visitor to 

 combine the exhilaration of overcoming ob- 

 stacles with the physical exercise attending 

 the woodsman's mode of travel. Fourth: nat- 

 ural phenomena that make a purely intellec- 



tual or esthetic appeal, as do the conflicts be- 

 tween the great insentient forces of nature, 

 the processes of geological upbuilding and de- 

 struction, the intimate inter-relations of 

 plants and animals, and the contentions for 

 mastery that are forever recurring through- 

 out the whole realm of living things. We be- 

 lieve the last, the mental appeal, to be the ele- 

 ment of greatest recreative value in nature, 

 but the other three are only of slightly less im- 

 portance. 



The question may now be raised : " Can na- 

 tional parks meet these requirements any more 

 fully than other uncultivated areas ? " "With 

 the country in its present half developed state 

 the objection has a certain degree of force. In 

 this era one is inclined to think of the unpro- 

 tected wilds as the silent, virginal and un- 

 spoiled regions of the earth, and to regard na- 

 tional parks as comparatively well-peopled 

 areas where plants and animals are subjected 

 to artificial restrictions. To a limited extent, 

 and for the moment, this impression is a true 

 one. But the objection will have less force in 

 the course of a few years, and none whatever 

 if by that time the full recreative possibilities 

 of the parks have been realized. For the com- 

 mercial exploitation of nature that is now 

 going on so rapidly elsewhere, is daily making 

 the conditions we have described harder to seek, 

 and is confining them more and more closely to 

 the park areas, where the administrators 

 should be taking measures to propagate and 

 conserve them. By this we do not mean that 

 the parks should in any way be conventional- 

 ized or transformed. On the contrary, it is 

 their chief function to prevent just that dis- 

 figurement of the face of nature by industrial 

 machinery which is being carried on at such a 

 disastrous rate in other localities. We mean 

 rather that the ideal recreative conditions now 

 to be found in them should be preserved, that 

 all factors disturbing to these conditions 

 should be excluded, and that the artificial ele- 

 ments required for the practical work of ad- 

 ministration should be disguised or beautified 

 past offense. 



Let us, however, take up these points in 

 greater precision and detail. The first neces- 



