Taking, however, a concrete point of criticism, such as that of the monumental planning of modern Paris as derived from forest rides, the critic need only walk through any French forest, or even to consult a Baedeker, or other guide-book, with its maps of any historic dwelling and its surroundings, from Chantilly or Fontainebleau to minor ones, to see that this plan, originally devised for the pleasure, success and safety [Page:  137] of the hunt, and later adapted to domination and defence, became next appreciated as affording the finest possible perspectives of the palatially rebuilt chateau.  So that it is not at all a fantastic hypothesis, but an obvious and inevitable conclusion that Napoleon’s and Haussman’s plans were not at all invented by them for Paris, but were directly imitated from the familiar landscape architecture of the preceding century, which again was but the simplest development from the spacious forest rides of older hunting nobles, laid out without any thought of the architectural and city developments they were destined in later centuries to determine.

The citizen of Washington had till lately often forgotten that the magnificent perspectives of his city are due to the French landscape-architect (Major L’Enfant) whom Washington imported for the express purpose of laying out his capital; yet it is no less clear that this most magnificent of the New World city plans is derived from Old World forest rides, than that its monumental edifices descend from Renaissance and classic exemplars.

I plead indeed for such studies of the plans of any and every city from the point of view of its natural development.  The too purely abstract and subjective sociology of the dwellers of great cities like London would in this way be helped by the facts of their own topographic history, already well known and clearly explained by geographer and historian, towards again feeling with the naturalist that even the modern city is but the most complex evolutionary expression and development of the life of Nature.

This view I take to be indeed a commonplace in France; but I account for its apparent unfamiliarity to English readers from the fact of our scanty forests in this island being left practically wild, our nobles not inhabiting them, but the cultivated pasture and arable regions below—­planting trees indeed, “plantations,” but seldom woods, and practically never forests at all.  This again brings out the fact that the French nobles, despite our urban associations with regard to them have belonged far more than ours to the social formation and tradition of the hunter—­while ours, despite their love of sports, are yet fundamentally squires, i.e., essentially and historically approximating to the peasants of their villages.  The bearing of all this upon their respective history will be obvious.  Here again we have the origins of the vivid contrast of the English or so-called naturalistic style of landscape-gardening with the more formal