190 
NATURE NOTES. 
area has been enforced — c.g., on the great road near Ascot, and 
cn the road from Southampton to Salisbury in the neighbour- 
hood of the New Forest. It is, however, desirable to simplify 
the procedure and to put roadside strips, so far as obstructions 
are concerned, on the same footing as metalled roads. This 
object the Commons Preservation Society hope to attain by 
legislation at the first convenient opportunhy. 
In towns the equivalent of the wayside strip is a line of 
trees edging the street, and a movement, fostered by all the 
Open Space Societies and headed by Mr. Shaw Lefevre, has 
recently taken shape to supply London with suitable boulevards. 
A means of doing this exists in the rule that in a metropolitan 
thoroughfare no projection beyond the general line of buildings 
can take place without the consent of the London County 
Council. The Metropolitan Board carelessly threw away this 
great power of improving London, and allowed one-storey shops 
to be run out in many places. The County Council are not 
likely thus to betray their trust. The front courts or gardens 
between the house line and the road being valueless property, 
could at a trifling expense be acquired for the public and con- 
verted into avenues and tree-planted side-ways. A committee 
to further such a treatment of the great thoroughfares of the Pen- 
tonville, Euston and Marylebone Roads has lately been formed. 
Another movement of a different kind has arisen during 
the last year. Those working amongst the poor have been 
struck by the lack of cricket and football grounds, and the conse- 
quent difficulty of popularising healthy outdoor games amongst 
the wage-earning population of London. Captain John Sinclair, 
of the County Council, has with great perseverance and tact 
got together a representative body under the name of the London 
Playing Fields Committee, and much information as to the 
demand for, and supply of, playing fieldshas been collected. So 
far as the Committee succeed merely in forming cricket grounds 
on existing open spaces, the Open Space Societies have little 
direct interest in the matter — indeed it may be their duty to 
oppose an excessive application of such a treatment ; but as a 
new argument for the necessity of ample open spaces round 
London the movement may be warmly welcomed. 
At the extreme opposite wing of the army marches the 
Selborne Society. That it is warmly interested in the preserva- 
tion of open spaces it would be waste of time to prove ; the 
movement for saving Sudbrook Park from the builder originated 
in the Lower Thames Valley Branch of the Selborne Society. 
But it views open spaces less as affording means of exercise and 
as reservoirs of fresh air than as store-houses of natural beauty. 
Its object is to prevent the disappearance of wild nature before 
the drill-sergeant of tillage and building. An open common, 
where the very grouping of furze, turf and heather is the uncon- 
scious work of centuries of use, a wild wood where natural forces 
are allowed undisturbed sway, even a great park where tree- 
