EDITORIAL GLEANINGS. 119 



To carry out the objects of the society prompt action must be 

 taken, for year by year suitable areas become fewer ; and local 

 plants and insects are found to have been extirpated when the 

 acquisition of a few acres of land would have saved them. Such 

 land is often unsuitable for other purposes ; an isolated spot on 

 Government property, a piece of marshland, a bird-haunted cliff, or 

 a stretch of wood and copse where the undergrowth has been 

 allowed to follow its own devices are admirable subjects for Nature 

 reserves. Above all, it is essential that the land selected or reserved 

 should as far as possible retain its primitive wildness. Such lands 

 still exist in the United Kingdom, though each year they become 

 more rare, and once deprived of their indigenous occupants they can 

 never be restored to a natural state. It should be borne in mind, 

 that if in the course of time, owing to the growth of a city, or for 

 some other reason, a nature reserve has ceased to serve its purpose, 

 the ground would still be valuable as an open space. 



FOEEIGN NATUEE EeSEEVES. 



On the Continent, as already observed, the importance of nature 

 reserves has been widely recognized. In Germany, particularly, a 

 large amount of land has been reclaimed, and in a recently published 

 book, Herr H. Conwentz, Prussian State Commissioner for the Care 

 of Natural Monuments, gives a detailed account of the work done in 

 several States of the Empire. Bavaria, more than a hundred years 

 ago, bought up the Bamberg suburban woods, afterwards forbidding 

 indiscriminate forestry, and ordering the foresters to preserve and 

 catalogue the chief natural features. Later, a general committee 

 composed of delegates from the municipality and from local and 

 artistic societies have been exceptionally successful in securing wild 

 "parks" for rare plants. In Hessen and Oldenburg special atten- 

 tion has been paid to the preservation of primeval forest land ; while 

 in the first years of the new century Prussia began to recognize the 

 necessity of protecting nature reserves, and these have since been 

 regularly registered and mapped, Parliament, the Educational 

 Department, and the Department of Agriculture and Domains 

 acting conjointly to assist the movement. Thus, Memmert, an un- 

 inhabited island between Juist and Borkum in the German Ocean, is 

 now reserved as a bird sanctuary, with a watcher to look after it 

 during the breeding season ; and a tract of salt marsh near Artern 

 perpetuates the plant association of the locality. Elsewhere spots 

 especially favoured by wild nature have been similarly secured ; for 



