EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 



225 



with the strong sense and good taste of a thorough 

 Englishman. If land were as plenty and cheap in 

 America as it is in England, Americans might, per- 

 haps, talk of public parks, also ! But whether they 

 would have them, is another matter. A very pretty 

 discussion might be got up, touching the utility of 

 public parks, in a country so utilitarian as ours pro- 

 fesses to be ; and much might be said on both sides. 

 At all events, we do not propose to enter the lists as a 

 debater. Yet, in the small specimens of inclosed 

 grounds which exist in some of our principal cities, 

 and dignified with the name of " Parks," we can not 

 but imagine that if, instead of acres by tens, so appro- 

 priated, they had been by hundreds, cities containing 

 them would be all the better for it. 



In sober earnest : it is a disgrace, in point of pub- 

 lic taste, that our cities and large towns show no speci- 

 mens of extended park and pleasure-grounds for the 

 multitude. For the lack of these, and the consequent 

 lack of respect to the character of trees, there is hardly 

 a place of public resort in the United States, in which 

 the trees standing about them are not whittled and 

 scarred by the impudent initials cut into their bark 

 by the visitors ; and thought, at the time, to be exceed- 

 ingly smart, by the perpetrators. — Ed. 



Educational Institutions. — It may not be much 

 out of place, to add a few remarks in regard to the 

 somewhat cognate subject of gardens or pleasure- 

 grounds attached to some great educational institutions; 

 cognate, at least, in this respect, that these grounds, as 

 well as the public park, might be made the means of 

 communicating important instruction. It should seem , 

 10* 



