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 French tradition. Yet in a very true sense we see the former to be even more highly artificial than the latter. [Page: 138] The English citizen who may even admit this way of looking at the contrasted city plans of London and Paris may fail, unless he has appreciated the principle here involved, to see why London and Paris houses are so different--the one separate and self-contained, with its door undefended and open upon the street, while the normal Parisian house is a populous, high-piled tenement around a central court, with high _porte cochère_ closed by massive oaken doors and guarded by an always vigilant and often surly _concierge_. A moment of historical reflection suffices to see that the former is the architecture of a long-settled agricultural place, with its spreading undefended villages, in which each household had its separate dwelling, the other a persistence of the Continental fortified city crowded within its walls. But beyond this we must see the earlier historic, the simpler geographic origins of the French courtyard house as a defensible farmyard, of which the ample space was needed nightly for defence against wild beasts, if not also wilder men, against whom the _concierge_ is not only the antique porter but the primitive sentinel. I may seem unduly to labour such points, yet do so advisedly, in order to emphasise and make clearer the essential thesis of this portion of my paper--that every scientific survey involves a geographic and historic exploration of origins, but that of the still unwritten chapter, that the far-reaching forelook, idealistic yet also critical, which is needful to any true and enduring contribution to social service, is prepared for by habitually imaging the course of evolution in the past.