X INTEODUOTION. 



admirable preparations may be seen for the formation of a mighty 

 cordon of suburban St. Gileses. A most crying eyil of this 

 period of change when the masses of workers are steadily desert- 

 ing the country for the city, is that our towns are still built 

 upon a plan worthy of the dark ages, and only barely justifiable 

 where the breath of the meadow sweeps through the high-street. 



Many people are apt to connect city improyement with 

 autocratic government. One has only to speak of our back- 

 wardness, to be reminded that it is all owing to our not being 

 blessed with a Napoleon. The best comment upon such a 

 suggestion is that since the establishment of the Eepublic in 

 France, improvements calculated to produce the best effects on 

 the beauty and salubrity of Paris have been carried out more 

 vigorously than before, with this difference, that they are done 

 more economically. In the creation of tree-planted streets in 

 the more crowded parts both of London proper and the suburbs, 

 they should not as a rule be formed on the site of old and much- 

 frequented streets, but, as far as possible, be pierced between 

 them, leaving the largest and most populous thoroughfares of the 

 present day to become the secondary ones of the future. 



Here and there may be noticed in the book an impatience with 

 the present condition of things as regards the direction of gardens 

 by persons having no sympathy with the art. This is one of the 

 causes why public gardens afford little pleasure or instruction 

 compared with that of which they are capable. In Paris the direc- 

 tion of public gardens is frequently placed in the hands of 

 botanists, engineers, and architects — hence stereotyped and very 

 imperfect work. The plan and spirit of the old botanic garden is 

 wholly wrong as a system, and from it there is no hope. One of 

 these, of which the Garden of Plants may be taken as a type, so 

 far from helping horticulture is a living and persistent blight 

 upon its progress, in the region possessing such a garden. The 

 leading idea in these gardens is that collections cannot be accu- 

 mulated without arranging them in a hideous and depressing 

 manner. The truth is, however, that when the art of gardening 

 is properly understood, it will be found that the richer the collec- 

 tion the more beautiful and varied will be the effect. But improve- 

 ment will probably never come through botanists, whose true and 

 very sufficient field is the world, with the herbarium in which to 



