TEXTBOOK OF LANDSCAPE GARDENING 
some areas which ought to be saved and consecrated to public 
use. There will be lakes, rivers, stretches of seashore, mountains 
and other types of natural scenery for which all good citizens will 
naturally feel a deep love and reverence. There will be spots of 
special historic interest which should be preserved. All these in- 
terests can best be cared for in some sort of state park system. 
It is best at this point to avoid drawing any distinctions between 
state parks and state forests. Indeed there are other kinds of pub- 
lic lands sometimes serving admirably the purposes of state parks, 
for example reserved watersheds, military reservations, etc. Any 
fair view of a state’s resources will include all such lands which are 
open to the public, and any plans for the future must give attention 
to these different forms of land holdings. 
A State’s Needs 
Some effort has been made to establish a ratio of park area to 
population. For example it used to be thought that a city should 
have one acre of park to every 200 inhabitants. More lately the 
estimates have approached a ratio of one acre to each 100 inhab- 
itants. Yet vague as are these estimates they are like the exact- 
ness of pure mathematics compared with our knowledge of what 
the country needs as a whole, outside the city park systems. It is 
plain that such a ratio could hardly be followed in practice, any 
way, since densely populated states like Connecticut and Rhode 
Island could not possibly set aside so much land per capita as should 
be reserved by large states of sparser population, like Texas or 
Wisconsin. 
Evidently the size of the state is a factor, too, in the computa- 
tion. Thus we can only say that the area of park land needed varies 
directly with the size of the state and the density of population, but 
it would be impossible in the present knowledge of social science to 
represent these factors in exact figures. We may be pretty sure, 
however, that whatever may be the theoretically desirable allow- 
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