Recapitulation of Cost of Reservation.

Following is a recapitulation, showing the total cost of Watkins Glen Reservation for purchase, maintenance and improvement by the State, up to the termination of our jurisdiction at midnight July 21, 1911:

Less receipts for concessions and sales of old materials remitted to the State Treasurer.

1,195 80

Net cost of the reservation.

$101,705 51

LETCHWORTH PARK AND ARBORETUM.

Sir Walter Scott on Forestry and Landmark Preservation. Nearly 100 years ago, Sir Walter Scott made one of his characters in "The Heart of Midlothian," the Laird of Dumbiedikes, when on his death bed, give this advice to his son:

"Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree. It will be growing, Jock, when ye're sleeping."

A Scottish Earl took this advice so seriously, says Sir Walter, that he planted a large tract of country with trees - a practice promoted in these later days by the arboricultural societies of Great Britain, the Continent, the Far East, and America.

*The funds for purchase did not pass through the hands of this Society. The aggregate of the items appropriated by chapter 513 of the Laws of 1910 was $19,640, including a reappropriation of unexpended funds amounting to $3,000. As a matter of fact, the amount unexpended and intended to be reappropriated was only $1,825.90, and we have included that item at that amount only in the total appropriation above stated.

The amount unused by this Society in this case was available for use by its successors.

Sir Walter, in the stories based on his rambles and researches as a lover of nature and antiquities, also stimulated the preservation of natural scenery and historic landmarks. In the same novel, after describing the picturesque Salisbury Crags at Edinburgh, he adds a foot-note in which he says: "A beautiful and solid pathway has, within a few years, been formed around these romantic rocks, and the Author has the pleasure to think that the passage in the text gave rise to the undertaking."

Scott may therefore be considered as one of the pioneers in the encouragement of arboriculture and the conservation of natural scenery, although the latter, as an organized movement, is scarcely more than twenty-five or thirty years old.

For seventeen years, the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, a leading exponent of landscape and landmark preservation in America, and incidental to this work, has, in a general way, encouraged the following of the Scotch author's excellent advice to stick a tree into the ground when opportunity offered. During the past year, however, the development of its widely ramifying work has brought to it a great opportunity to develop in more specific form than heretofore the arboricultural side of its work by the establishment of what promises to take its place among the foremost of the world's arboretums.

In order that the plan and importance of this project may be understood, a few words may be said concerning the opportunity which is presented, and concerning the agency of an arboretum in the movement for the conservation of both our natural resources and our landscape beauty.

Location of Letchworth Park.*

Letchworth Park is a beautiful tract of 1,000 acres of land, on the Genesee River, in the State of New York, which the late William Pryor Letchworth, LL. D., the philanthropist, gave to the State for a public park, to be in the custody of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. [See plates 7, 8, 9 and 10.] Dr. Letchworth, who died on December 1, 1910, in the eighty-eighth year of his age, was a man of singular sweetness

*A portion of the following pages in regard to Letchworth Park and Arboretum is taken from an article by Hon. Charles M. Dow, Chairman of our Letchworth Park Committee and Director of the Park and Arboretum, entitled "A Great Living Tree Museum," published in the Review of Reviews for February, 1912.

and beauty of character. During his earlier years, he acquired a comfortable fortune in the manufacturing business in Buffalo, New York, but while attending to his business affairs, gave much time and thought to the promotion of art, science and charity. After a while he entirely relinquished the cares of private business for those of service to his fellowmen, and the last half of his life was devoted almost exclusively to the cause of ameliorating the condition of the epileptic, the mentally defective, and other dependent classes.

In 1859, while still engaged in active business, and with a view to securing a quiet repose in which to develop those broad ideas of philanthropy to which he eventually devoted himself so completely, he made an initial purchase of country property on the Genesee River at Portage Falls. Here, within a distance of three miles, the river plunges over three falls which, with their intermediate cascades, have an aggregate descent of 290 feet, and flows through a remarkable gorge with almost vertical sides 350 feet high. "Portage" indicates the place of transport where the aborigines and early settlers carried their canoes, bateaux, and goods between the still waters above and below the falls, and in turn has been given by geologists to the group of Upper Devonic strata which have been exposed in such an extraordinary way by the cutting of the stream. The scenery here is extremely varied and picturesque, with frowning cliffs, dark retreats, shadowy forests, and roaring cataracts, contrasting with open plateaus, smiling meadows, fruitful orchards, and tinkling rivulets. It is a place in which a Thoreau or a Bryant would have taken delight, and is ranked second to Niagara Falls among natural beauty spots of the Empire State. One day, as Mr. Letchworth witnessed the rainbow which on a sunny day forms in the perpetual mist of the principal waterfall, he gave to the place the name of Glen Iris, a name which it bore for nearly half a century until officially superseded by his own name in the title of Letchworth Park.

When Mr. Letchworth acquired the property, it had been devastated by lumbering operations and was littered with the debris of a saw-mill which stood near the Middle Fall. He therefore set about the work of restoration. He removed the debris; reforested part of the denuded areas, importing some specimens of foreign trees, and in other ways restored natural conditions. But he did

more than restore primitive conditions. With singular art and rare judgment, without violating nature, he built paths, roads, bridges, arbors and shelters, so that others might come and freely share the delights of the charming place. Looking forward to the time when he could turn over his perfected gift to his fellow-men for their perpetual enjoyment, he added to his possessions until, after the expenditure of about $500,000 in purchase and improvements, he found himself in possession of about a thousand acres, on both sides of the river, embracing the three famous Portage Falls and the wonderful gorge which they have cut.

Living in this sequestered place, not only did his activities reach out in all directions to his contemporaries, but his thoughts also reverted to the aboriginal owners who once dwelt there in the unconfined enjoyment of Nature's patrimony. This led him to erect a museum of Indian relics. Thither he took a section of the Big Tree under which the red man sat and made the historic treaty by which he ceded his sovereignty over these domains to the white man. There he brought the old log Council House of Caneadea, that it might be preserved as a reminder of the Long House of the Iroquois. There he reverently interred the remains of Mary Jemison, the White Woman of the Genesee, whose history is one of the romances of the pioneer annals of the State. Later, he set up near the grave the log cabin of Mary Jemison's daughter, and his last public appearance was at the dedication of a beautiful bronze statue of the white captive which he erected at the foot of her grave.

In the summer of 1906, feeling the weight of years, Dr. Letchworth invited the counsel of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society as to the final disposition of his property, and asked the Society if it would assume the custody and care of it if he should give it to the State. The negotiatiors culminated in 1907, in the gift of this superb property to the State. Dr. Letchworth retained a life tenancy of the estate, which was terminated by his death on December 1, 1910. The property is therefore in the care of the custodian society, which, during the months which have since elapsed, has been formulating plans not only for the general treatment of the park, but also for the establishment of an arboretum in line with the general plans discussed with the donor before his death. In connection with this work Mr. Dow, the

Chairman of our Letchworth Park Committee, in a recent trip around the world, has visited the principal arboretums of America, Europe, and the Far East, and believes that an arboretum can be developed in Letchworth Park which will become one of the leading institutions for the promotion of forest conservation in the United States and take rank with the best arboretums of the world. In some respects it will be the first of its kind.

The Arboretum's Place in the Conservation Movement.

The opportunity presented by Letchworth Park for an arboretum is a timely one and fits most usefully into the movement for the conservation of our natural resources. It is a case in which the movement for the protection of historic landmarks and beautiful scenery lends itself to distinctly utilitarian ends. During the eight years in which the so-called conservation movement has developed from the germ idea expressed by Theodore Roosevelt. before the Society of American Foresters on March 26, 1903, the people of New York State and the Nation at large have awakened to the alarming consequences of the almost unrestrained denudation of our forests. New York State was once a waving forest from end to end, so densely covered with trees that the pioneer had to cut them away, in order to make room for the cabin and the plow. Following the pioneer period came a period of commercial enterprise, in which the forests passed from the status of a nuisance to the status of a commercial commodity. Then ensued a slaughter of trees, which has almost entirely destroyed our forests except in certain areas protected by law in the Adirondack and Catskill Mountain regions. Also, with exceptions so small as almost to be negligible, this destruction has been absolute, the propagation of a new growth having been left almost entirely to the uncertain chances of natural reproduction. The result is that at the present rate of denudation, unless measures are taken to check it and to promote reforestation, the State is threatened with the complete obliteration of her unprotected forests within the short period of twenty-five years. We have the assurance of the Secretary of Agriculture that substantially the same thing can be said of the country at large.

This situation should be, and, to the thinking person, is startling. One reason why it has not startled us before is that the