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“My friend has so long lived his life with nature that it has become the theme of his chief study. He outlined this to me one evening when the rain caused us to transfer our coffee from the terrace to the conservatory, where his ideas became permanently associated with the impressions of azalea bloom and jasmine fragrance which I acquired at the same time.

“‘I am slowly accumulating,’ he said, ‘facts and ideas for a history of the relations between nature and man in the United States. The conditions have been peculiar, and the results more than ordinarily interesting. Nowhere else, for example, have people possessing all the arts of civilization made their homes in the midst of absolutely primitive nature. With such a beginning, three thousand years of history have here been epitomized in three hundred. Nature as an enemy was soon conquered, and nowhere else has she afterward shown herself more friendly in surface fertility and underground resources. Our vast and relatively undiversified territory has brought men of the coast, the mountains, and the plains; of the rugged North and the languorous South, into closer and more constant contact than ever before. And to this unparalleled interplay we have welcomed myriads from every other climate and condition on the earth, and have set up for the whole theories of government which allow almost perfect freedom to all racial, local, and individual traits.