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