WILD PARKS OF THE WEST 5 



infinitely beautiful, though only dimly visible to 

 the eye of imagination. The geysers, too, 

 spouting from the hot underworld ; the steady, 

 long-lasting glaciers on the mountains, obedient 

 only to the sun ; Yosemite domes and the tre- 

 mendous grandeur of rocky canons and moun- 

 tains in general, — these must always be wild, 

 for man can change them and mar them hardly 

 more than can the butterflies that hover above 

 them. But the continent's outer beauty is fast 

 passing away, especially the plant part of it, the 

 most destructible and most universally charming 

 of all. 



Only thirty years ago, the great Central Val- 

 ley of California, five hundred miles long and 

 fifty miles wide, was one bed of golden and pur- 

 ple flowers. Now it is ploughed and pastured 

 out of existence, gone forever, — scarce a mem- 

 ory of it left in fence corners and along the 

 bluffs of the streams. The gardens of the Si- 

 erra, also, and the noble forests in both the re- 

 served and unreserved portions are sadly hacked 

 and trampled, notwithstanding the ruggedness 

 of the topography, — all excepting those of the 

 parks guarded by a few soldiers. In the noblest 

 forests of the world, the ground, once divinely 

 beautiful, is desolate and repulsive, like a face 

 ravaged by disease. This is true also of many 

 other Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain valleys 

 and forests. The same fate, sooner or later, is 



