59 



Dr. MacCracken was followed by the Hon. Douglas 

 Mathewson, President of the Borough of the Bronx, whose 

 address follows : 



THE BRONX OF TODAY AND THE LAND IT WAS 

 A HUNDRED YEARS AGO 



Before the world's first artists with crude materials made 

 pictures that other men could see, other men saw pictures, 

 colored by the light of their own dreams, that none could see 

 exactly alike. Art has improved. With better materials, 

 better training and the consequent superior technique, the 

 painter, and indeed, the mechanical reproducer of scenes, pre- 

 sent to the eye pictures which seem to tempt one into the un- 

 rolling perspective which they hold, where the ancients pre- 

 sented drawing in but one plane. Mental pictures still are 

 much the same. They differ, perhaps, to everyone who con- 

 jures them into being, even though there be the most gifted 

 attempt to portray them in word painting. 



So it must be with us as we endeavor to bring within the 

 ken of our mental vision the fair land of one hundred years 

 ago that has now become The Bronx. Where teeming thou- 

 sands of a population congested in many places, now go about 

 their multitudinous ways of business and pleasure, few people 

 then inhabited what was a truly rural area. What Jona-^ 

 Bronck, nearly two centuries before, had described as this 

 beautiful country, the land covered with virgin forest, and of 

 unlimited opportunities, the veritable paradise that needed but 

 the industrious hand of man to make it the finest and most 

 beautiful region in all the world, had received, to only a limited 

 extent, the care of man. But as there still may be seen in our 

 parks and in those parts of the Borough to which we may still 

 retire from the haunts where men do most congregate, beau- 

 tiful hillsides, limpid streams, rolling meadows, glorious 

 woods. — aye, forests almost primeval, so a hundred years ago 

 could Nature in all her loveliness be seen all over our broad 



