timbers. 



126 



[August, 1911. 



and his animals against cold or fierce 

 winds, a hot sun, &c. He then com- 

 menced, after the fashion of man, 

 energetically, but more or leas spasmodi- 

 cally, to endeavour to repair the effect 

 of his own destructiveness. To his 

 surprise, however, he found it was by 

 no means so easy to replace the trees on 

 spots from which he had ruthlessly cut 

 them. Nature's balance had been 

 unduly interfered with ; the rich store 

 of good soil built up through the ages 

 in her own storehouses of the past had 

 been wastefully dissipated, and whereas 

 she herself never asked the tiees to 

 grow on bed-rock, man did. 



Also, as time went on, the atmosphere, 

 especially in the larger cities and com- 

 mercial centres, became polluted and 

 vitiated with smoke and acids, and man, 

 having no time or wish to study the 

 method by which Nature reclothes the 

 soil when left to herseif after he had 

 passed by, gave up his attempts to 

 maintain trees near or within the areas, 

 rapidly increasing in density of popula- 

 tion in which he worked and lived. 



We thus arrive at another stage in the 

 history of man and the tree. The 

 city increased in size ; the population 

 doubled, trebled, and quadrupled itself ; 

 the single-room tenement, as we were 

 shown by Lord Pentland the other day, 

 made its appearance and came to stay ; 

 the streets became narrower, the houses 

 higher, and the tree itself disappeared. 

 If we look at the large densely populated 

 capitals of Europe and the great com- 

 mercial centres of the present day, we find 

 in both that in the parts occupied by 

 the poor classes and workers the signi- 

 ficance of the tree as the close neighbour 

 and companion of man throughout a 

 considerable portion of his existence 

 on the globe has been forgotten or 

 lost to view. But the instinct is 

 there, deep implanted in the heart 

 of each one. Even to the born and 

 bred city child, the descendant of 

 several generations of town-bred men, 

 the craving for a sight of a green field 

 or of a wood comes dimly at times. 

 Probably most of us who are acquainted 

 with great cities have come across 

 instances of such. It was my fortune 

 once to see a youngster from the slums 

 of London taken into a Kentish hop- 

 field. He came from one of the worst 

 parts of the great city, and in all his 

 little life had only seen a grimy plane 

 tree and a dark, sooty green grass plot. 

 In the train, so soon as the open country 

 had been reached, he remained speech- 

 less. Once in the hop-gardens he re- 

 covered his voice, and went wild with 

 excitement and delight, It was very 



easy to see man's instinctive love for 

 wild nature and nature's growth there. 

 Equally apparent is it in most of us born 

 and bred in civilised countries when we 

 come face to face for the first time with 

 a tropical forest. Instincts and thoughts 

 to which we fail to give expression surge 

 up within us as we feel that once again 

 we have come into contact with the 

 original homes of our ancestors ; and the 

 feelings, mind you which are aroused by 

 such a contact, which were aroused in 

 that London lad in the hop-garden, are 

 the very ones which it is to the interest 

 of mankind to keep alive and stimulate. 



Mankind does not seem to improve 

 with his growing habit of congregating 

 in dense masses in cities and towns. He 

 appears, somehow, to lose something of 

 that freshness and breeziness which we 

 associate with the mountain top and 

 find in the dweller on the mountain top. 

 In our more spacious, if less civilised and 

 cultivated days, we lived in closer touch 

 with Nature, and there are those who 

 say that in many ways we were better 

 men for the contact. But the closer life 

 in cities is doing something which, as I 

 think, is even worse for human nature 

 than this. We are losing some of the 

 finer instincts, and cetainly our finer 

 senses of sight and hearing, and even of 

 smell. I do not speak from any medical 

 knowledge of the subject, but simply 

 from personal observations made during 

 a number of year's contact with the folk 

 of the jungles and mountainous regions 

 of India. They can give us points and a 

 beating in all of the last three ; and yet 

 there is no reason to suppose that our 

 ancestors — the ancient Britons, who 

 dressed in blue paint — were not possessed 

 of these finer senses, and were not the 

 equal in these respects, of the present- 

 day aborigine- 



Of course, I do not wish to be under- 

 stood as saying that the town-and 

 city-bred man can hope to remain the 

 equal of the country man in his know- 

 ledge of Nature or in those senses which 

 demand to be constantly used to be kept 

 in high order. But my point is that a 

 good deal more might and should be 

 done to help the dweller in the densely 

 populated portions of the great cities 

 and commercial centres to keep to some 

 extent in touch with Nature. He should 

 be able to see and live with trees, and to 

 see daily, not only on holidays or at the 

 expense of a long walk, which he will 

 not take, trees and areas of green grass 

 and flowers. We who live in the open air 

 and habitually enjoy such sights, and 

 those who spend several weeks or months 

 in the year annually in the country, find 

 it difficult to picture the mind of a child 



