One cause of this antipathetic attitude toward mountains and wild scenery is, doubtless, as has been often suggested, the hardships and perils of travel before good roads were built. Biese quotes several eighteenth-century letters from German travelers to show how much “die schlechten Strassen” had to do with the failure to appreciate the romantic beauty of the Alps.[59] He finds another partial explanation of the small interest in mountain travel in the fact that scientific study of natural phenomena such as glaciers, geological formations, mountain flora and fauna, was as yet in its infancy and that thus one whole class of motives for enduring fatigue and braving difficulties was wanting.[60] But these two reasons do not sufficiently account for the lack of mountain fervor. It is not merely good roads and scientific enthusiasm that bid men seek mountain solitudes today. Preoccupation with terror and fatigue were not the only nor the chief reason for this general dislike of wild scenery. The two charges even more persistently and definitely brought against mountains are that they are useless, and that they are a deformity on the surface of the earth. Now the first of these is but another expression of the dominant utilitarian standards of value, and the second is an outcome of the prevailing desire for orderly and systematic arrangement. Pronounced irregularity of outline was as irritating to the artistic consciousness as was exceptional license in verse forms. Mountains entered an inevitable protest against the spirit that found its highest pleasure in the symmetrical complexities of a typical eighteenth-century garden. That this protest was on a great scale with accompanying suggestions of mystery and of a remote irresistible power, gives an added reason why the age turned thus decisively from forms of nature to which a romantic age yields fullest homage. Thus the attitude toward mountains finds its real explanation not so much in external conditions as in the spirit of the times.