NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 
75 
closets—and full gardens and fat. But what did they 
look like? What was their form? How were the 
things planted? Not in “curious knots”—yet in 
beds; what were these like? What was their arrange¬ 
ment? Or, to reduce all these questions to one, what 
were their garden designs? 
Garden making is a primitive art; nothing, indeed, 
antedates it as an occupation, whatever one’s favored 
authority may be. So we may confidently say that 
it was in making garden that man first gave expres¬ 
sion to himself. All must have hunted the Diplod- 
ocus and defended themselves from the Anoplothe- 
rium—which was not so very fierce, after all, they say 
—or from those frightful ancestors of the hyena that 
could grind up the bones of the ancestors of our bears 
and lions even as the bull pup chews a chicken wing to- 
day, in very much the same way. But when it came to 
clearing away the forest and shaping a field, here was 
chance for variation; and ever increasing opportunity 
for more and more variation, as the earth was grad¬ 
ually subdued. 
It is in the form of his garden, therefore, that man 
has always been, and is, and always will be, most 
self-revealing. He is utterly unable to be anything 
else. There is something within each one of us that 
shapes—actually, not figuratively—the work of our 
hands; a something that directs all the delicate forces 
