578 An Adirondack National Park. {June, 
could the gaps be filled in any one species or order, the line of 
descent might be followed through the ages to one common and 
generalized type. The varied forms to which that type gave rise 
are seen in the different genera of different natural orders. The 
time is far distant when all these can be traced step by step to 
their remote origin. But every little adds, and eventually a mon- 
ument will be raised which will tell how, and perhaps when, each 
individual plant reached its present state of perfection or de- 
generacy, 
:0: 
AN ADIRONDACK NATIONAL PARK. 
BY WILLIAM HOSEA BALLOU, 
PROPOSITION to convert the Adirondack region into a 
national park, ought only to need suggestion. The only 
portion of the public domain which has been set aside as a.na- 
tional park is located in the distant mountain regions of Montana 
and Wyoming. East of the Rockies and within a territory of four 
million thickly populated square miles, not a single national breath- 
ing ground exists. In the great Empire State lies an elevated 
country of vast area, as lovely as the mind of man has mental 
imagery to conceive. It stands to-day the prey of timber thieves 
and game butchers, so neglected by the State that its boundary 
lines have been lost, its forests denuded, its waters left to evapora- 
tion and outrage, and its maintenance denied of all but the small- 
est pittance. It is the particular surface of the globe that gives 
one a glimpse through the corridors of time. It is a part of the 
cradle of the earth. Here are blue-gray hypersthene and con- 
torted gneiss rocks—the first forms in nature’s attempts at world 
building. Before organisms came into existence these rocks 
formed their part in the stable foundation of the earth. The Adi- 
rondack region, then, is grandparent to the remainder of the 
globe. The Hudson, which rises in its clouds, is perhaps the 
oldest river in existence, being the ancient outlet of the Great 
Lakes’ ancestor, and hence the grandparent of waters. Will any 
one say that the Government of the United States ought not to 
be charged with the care of the portions of these aged relics 
which a great State has given over to weeds and bandits ? 
_ Two great watersheds lie within the State of New York at 
a ght angles to each other. They so interlock that writers have 
