PRESER VA TION OF SCENER Y. 
109 
time to consider what steps should be taken to place it far 
beyond the grasp of the private speculator, or to rescue it for 
ever from the toils of the powerful building company that 
doubtless is awaiting a favourable opportunity of entrapping it. 
On the northern outskirts of London, meadow and wood- 
land are more plentiful than in the suburbs south of the 
Thames, but common land and heaths are of far less extent. 
Finchley Common, with its 1,243 acres, has long since been en- 
closed, and Enfield Chase, in being disafforested, has suffered a 
similar fate. To compensate for the loss of these extensive 
areas as open spaces, the least that can be done is to preserve 
in its natural condition every acre of copse and woodland on the 
Northern Heights. 
“ A certain sadness is pardonable to one who watches the 
destruction of a grand natural phenomenon, even though its 
destruction bring blessings to the human race,” were the words 
of Charles Kingsley when about to tell the story of the conver- 
sion of the Great Fen from a wilderness into a fertile garden. 1 " 
The oak-covered slopes between Highgate and Hornsey may, 
to many eyes, be less sublime than the tangled waste of thicket 
and reed-bed bordering the lonely meres, mile after mile; but, 
to borrow another thought from the writer above quoted, 
“grandeur consists in form, not size,” and what grander sight, 
at any rate about London, could we wish for, than this hill}", 
almost precipitous, stretch of woodland, that recalls to those 
who know them the steep green glades among the hills in the 
Kentish and Sussex wealden. It needs but a few weeks’ labour 
here to complete a destruction that would call for a feeling of 
sadness not only pardonable, but commendable, resulting, as 
such destruction would, not in blessings, but in a calamity to 
London at large, by the addition of a mass of houses to the 
already overgrown suburbs, only to furnish their quota of 
chimney-smoke to the pall of fog and gloom that overhangs the 
metropolis at all seasons — even in summer. 
Space will not permit of pointing out at length the ways 
and means of keeping this part of Highgate Wood in its 
present beautiful state of nature. Purchase is apparently the 
only open course ; and, great as the obstacles in the way of 
such a course may be, they are worth surmounting to avert a 
loss sad enough to botanists, sadder still to lovers of scenery 
and nature for its own sake, and saddest by far to those who 
need fresh air and the sight of green trees most of all — the 
dwellers and toilers in the narrow streets of the great city. 
Archibald Clarke. 
* Prose Idylls (The Fen), p. 89. 
