io8 
NATURE NOTES 
whole country was directed to the question at issue. One hope- 
ful feature of the success of their campaign against the Nature- 
haters was, that they had not found it necessary during the past 
session to summon a meeting of the Parliamentary Amenities 
Committee. 
j\Ir. Bryce said that he must speak with considerable appro- 
bation of the useful effects of the Society for Checking the Abuse 
of Public Advertising. He was not sure whether he had given 
the organisation its full and correct designation, but that was most 
of it (laughter). This Society had done excellent work both by 
action and example in doing away with disfiguring advertise- 
ments. He thought it very desirable that those Societies which 
aimed at the preservation of Nature should be linked in broad 
sympathy with those which had for their object the care of 
historic monuments. Their aims were mainly identical— the 
retention for posterity of the beautiful nature spots and splendid 
monuments of their ancestors. The connection of natural his- 
tory with political history was a very close one. Whoever 
desired to study natural evolution must also study the methods 
of man acting along with it. They both pertained to the state 
in which the country was before the great industrial tide swept 
over it as a flood. They boasted in modern days of the great 
increase of population, of production, of wealth, of resources, &c. ; 
and they w'ent off into dithyrambics about these things. He was 
doubtful about the benefit of increased population. It seemed 
to him that it was better that people who lived in the world 
should be happy and comfortable than that there should be 
more of them (laughter and applause). It was with alarm he 
saw the spread of an unbeautiful industrialism. They had to 
go for many miles now from the industrial centres in search 
of Nature’s delights. Poetical geniuses nowadays had round 
them less material for inspiration than in John Milton’s days. 
IModern poets had less opportunity of becoming imbued with 
the charms of country sights and sounds than their ancestors of 
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This reacted on the whole 
mass of the population. The state of things which made more 
and more difficult of attainment the beauty and quiet which 
developed men’s poetic faculties, was a loss to the entire nation, 
which would become more sadly evident as time went on. 
Nature was like the Sibylline books — the less there was left of 
it the more precious it became. If societies like their own had 
been in existence in years past much might have been effected 
in the way of checking Nature’s desecration. He extended the 
term desecration to so-called “ restorations,” which were often 
almost as bad in their effects as demolition itself. One present- 
day evil particularly depressed him, and he did not know 
whether it was possible to find a remedy for it — this was the 
destruction of rare insects, animals and plants. He was neither 
an entomologist nor an ornithologist, and accordingly did not 
know how far the rule extended ; but, for one thing, the number 
