PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 53 



cised on those extensive, fruitful Orange groves, on the banks 

 of St. Juan, by the new planters under the British government, 

 some hundred acres of which, at a single plantation, has been 

 entirely destroyed to make room for the Indigo, Cotton, Corn, 

 Batatas, &c. or as they say, to extirpate the musquitoes, alledg- 

 ing that groves near their dwellings are haunts and shelters for 

 those persecuting insects; some plantations have not a single 

 tree standing, and where any have been left, it is only a small 

 coppice or clump, nakedly exposed and destitute . . . exhibiting 

 a mournful, sallow countenance; their native perfectly formed 

 and glossy green foliage as if violated, defaced and torn to 

 pieces by the bleak winds, scorched by the burning sun-beams 

 in summer, and chilled by the winter frosts" (pp. 253-54). 

 This "' devastation and destruction" is all the more borne in on 

 him by the contrast between what some places once were and 

 what they have become. At Mount Royal, overlooking Lake 

 George, stationing himself near an ancient Indian mount, he 

 compares the place as it appeared to him when he had first 

 visited it fifteen years before, " at which time there were no 

 settlements of white people, but all appeared wild and savage; 

 yet in that uncultivated state it possessed an almost inexpressi- 

 ble air of grandeur, which was now entirely changed" (p. 99). 

 "All," he laments, "has been cleared away and planted with 

 indigo, corn and cotton," and that too abandoned. The place 

 now appeared like a desert. Yet he is quick to give credit to 

 the late proprietor, who had had " some taste, as he has pre- 

 served the mount and this little adjoining grove inviolate" 

 (p. 100). 



Bartram is no less grieved at the effect of civilization on the 

 Indian, the favorite child of nature. The aesthetic element colors 

 his treatment of everything connected with nature. It can be 

 said that his Indians are part of the landscape he describes; 

 they exist in the unviolated nature he so much admires. This 

 attitude leads him to elegaic expressions over the decay of a 

 Golden Age due to the coming of white traders and settlers. 

 There can be no question of the sincerity of his descriptions, 

 yet some of them sound like the effusions of a Utopian traveller 

 rather than the report of a naturalist explorer. Here is a de- 

 scription of an Indian plain: 



