43 
NATURE NOTES. 
WEMBLY PARK: A PROTEST. 
jOUND a new railway-station in a suburban district is 
wrought a change more rapid far than that which 
takes place where the settler, it may be in the back- 
woods or prairie of America, has built his hut. Quickly 
as the forest is felled, the swamp drained, the soil for the first 
time ploughed up round the colonist’s new abode, far more 
speedily are the trees levelled, roads made, and houses run up, 
where the new station is built amid fields and hedges. 
Anyone travelling on what is known as the St. John’s Wood 
line of the Metropolitan Railway will have noticed that between 
Neasden and Harrow-on-the-Hill the train passes through a 
lonely and almost uninhabited stretch of pasture and undula- 
ting park-land, broken here and there by clumps of trees and 
now and then a copse. But much of this quiet and lonely 
tract, especially that part which comprises Wembly Park, 
known only to the pedestrian and the few inhabitants of the 
neighbourhood, is about to share the fate of all such places- 
within ten miles of the City, for about a mile and a half beyond 
Neasden, in the centre of Wembly Park, a new station is in 
course of erection. 
A few months ago, some small amount of public interest 
was aroused in this hitherto almost unknown rural spot to the 
north-west of London. Plere it was, during necessary excava- 
tions connected with the building of the station, that, at no 
great distance from the surface of the ground, a large number 
of fossil bones of deer and other animals were brought to light. 
Some notice of this discovery appeared in the daily papers at 
the time, but the event is not so well known as to render the 
present mention out of place. 
The erection of this railway station is intended for the pro- 
motion and development of a large scheme, which may, or may 
not, prove successful. Wembly Park is now in possession 
of the Metropolitan Railway Company, whose line passes right 
through it, and, according to a newspaper report of last summer 
and information obtained more latterly, it is the intention of the 
Company to make this park the future Exhibition Ground of 
London. A pleasure-garden will be laid out adjoining, and on 
a neighbouring eminence there is to be reared an enormous 
tower, a structure perhaps surpassing in height the Eiffel Tower 
of Paris. ’ The remaining part of the estate will be a veritable 
happy hunting-ground of the speculator, where shops and villas 
innumerable will spring up. 
So, good-bye to the green meadows through which wanders 
the now much-dwindled and reed-grown stream of the Brent/'; 
good-bye to the alder-copses ; — the elm-avenues, too, through 
whose tracery-work branches and delicate green foliage the 
