PRESERVATION OF PLANTS 
193 
ornithology is perhaps excusable, but the wild plants which 
grow at the feet of everybody, and which could not fly away 
even if they had the will to do so, should at least be familiar. 
The protection of birds is on a fairly satisfactory basis, 
because the bird-fanciers, the principal offenders against a 
Protection Order, know their birds, and do not commit an 
offence in ignorance. In the case of plants, to see a flower is 
at once, with most people, to pick it. No particular flower is 
sought, but that which comes to hand is wantonly destroyed, 
and nine times out of ten no one recognises what species it may 
be. A builder laying out a new estate would incur tremendous 
penalties, for he, more deliberately than any other, perhaps, 
destroys the habitats of many plants. Then think of the children 
who would offend under any kind of protective law. If Nature 
knowledge is to increase and be more widely diffused, some 
encouragement must be given to children to make their own 
collections. But apart from this, would any legislature be likely 
to prevent them enjoying that great delight of children’s days 
— the rambling after wild flowers ? 
Direct legislative protection is, if not impossible, at least 
inadvisable. What is most needed for the future is that the 
children should be properly educated. Encourage their taste 
for botany, but curb the natural propensity for destruction. 
Show them that to love the plants should necessarily mean also 
to protect them. Teach them that where there are but two 
specimens of a plant, both should remain unplucked, and that 
where there are a dozen, one or even two may be taken. 
Teach them that physical strength, which is the standard by 
which all children calculate the worth of their fellows, is more 
valiantly used in protecting what is helpless, than in assisting 
in its eradication. 
As the remedy then for the future, in the protection of 
plants, my answer is plain and simple, educate the children. 
But what can we do to remedy the faults of the past ? From 
a strictly scientific point of view, it is wrong to reintroduce 
lost species into a locality. In that case, a locality which has 
lost a species must never more possess it. I must confess the 
principle has no weight with me, and I must also confess to 
thinking that a good deal more of this introduction and re- 
introduction goes on than most scientific folk think. To re- 
introduce a species is in no way upsetting the balance of 
Nature, especially when its local extinction has been the result 
of an artificial process, such as draining or building, and it 
seems to me to be the right thing to do to reintroduce, where 
extinction has been the result of a process which is not one of 
Nature’s. Those who oppose reintroduction must remember 
that birds and small mammals are likely to introduce species 
to a spot, and those birds and mammals may be actually local 
introductions themselves, so that, though in this case, the 
introduction may be a natural process, yet it only results through 
a disturbance of Nature’s arrangements in higher animal life. 
