Buffon, in a page published in every “Cours de Littérature,” sings a hosanna to cultivated Nature, and appears unable to find words strong enough to express his horror of Nature in its savage state, “brute” Nature as he calls it. At the present day, our impression is precisely the reverse of this. We seek on almost inaccessible summits, in the region of eternal snow, and in the very heart of hitherto unexplored continents, a spot where man has not yet penetrated, and where we may behold Nature in her inviolate virginity. We are stifled by civilization, wearied out with books, newspapers, reviews, and periodicals, letters to write and to read; railway travelling, the post, the telegraph, and the telephone, devour time and completely mince up one’s life; any solitude for fruitful reflection is quite out of the question. Shall I find it, at least, among the fir-trees of the Carpathians, or beneath the shade of the old oaks of the Balkans? Industry is spoiling and soiling our planet. Chemical produce poisons the water, the dross from different works and factories covers the country, quarries split up the picturesque slopes of valleys, black coal smoke dulls the verdant foliage and the azure of the sky, the drainage of large cities turns our rivers into sewers, whence emerge the germs of typhus. The useful destroys the beautiful; and this is so general as at times to bring tears to the eyes. Have not the Italians on the lovely Isle of Sta. Heléna, near to the public gardens in Venice, erected works for the building of engines, and replaced the ruins of a fourth-century church by chimneys, whose opaque smoke, produced by the detestable bituminous coal of the Saar, would soon leave a sooty trace on the pink marble of the Doge’s palace and on the mosaics of St. Mark, just as we see them on St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, so ugly covered with sticky streaks. It is true that the produce of this industrial activity becomes condensed in revenue, which enriches many families, and adds considerably to the list of the bourgeois population inhabiting the capital. Here, on the banks of the Rhine, these revenues are represented by villas and castles, whose pseudo-Greek or Gothic architecture peeps out from among masses of exotic trees and plants in the most sought-after positions, near to Bonn, Godesberg, St. Goar or Bingen. Look! there is an immense feudal castle, beside which Stolzenfels, the Empress Augusta’s favorite residence, would be a mere shooting box. This immense assemblage of turrets, galleries, roofs, and terraces must have cost at least £80,000. Has it sprung from coal or from Bessemer steel? It is situated just below the noble ruin of Drachenfels. Will not the dragon watching over the Niebelungen treasure in Nifelheim’s den, avenge this impertinent challenge of modern plutocracy?