[1] In 1872, while a Commissioner of Health, I had occasion to examine and report on the causes of the high death rate during the summer months in the city of New York. The chief cause was determined to be the excessive heat which characterizes those months. It was recommended in the report to the Board of Health that legislation be secured empowering and requiring the Department of Parks to plant and cultivate trees, shrubs, plants, and vines in all the streets, avenues, and public places in the city. A bill was drafted and introduced into the Legislature, but it did not become a law, and no further effort has been made to secure such legislation. Meantime, two tree-planting societies have been established, one in the Borough of Brooklyn and the other in the Borough of Manhattan, which are endeavoring to awaken public interest to the importance of planting a suitable number and variety of trees in the streets for purposes of ornamentation. The aim of this paper, which is largely based on the report of 1872, is to revive the project of giving the Department of Parks jurisdiction over the trees in the streets, and require it to plant and cultivate additional trees, shrubs, plants, and other forms of vegetation for the improvement of the public health and for the purpose of ornamentation.

[2] Man and Nature. G.P. Marsh, New York, 1872.

[3] It is interesting to notice, in this connection, the remark of Angus Smith, that a temperature of 54° F. is important in the decomposition of animal and vegetable matter.

[4] Public Parks. By John H. Rauch, M.D., Chicago, 1869.

[5] Les Arbres, quoted by Marsh.

[6] The late Dr. Francis remarked that he had noticed a marked increase in the fatality of diseases in sections of the city after the removal of trees and all vegetation.

[7] The Groundwork of Science. A Study of Epistemology. By St. George Mivart, M.D., Ph.D., F.R.S. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1898.

[8] The position of the solid rock is shown by the hammer at the extreme right, standing vertically.

[9] This photograph represents a more detailed view of the quarry wall seen in Fig. 1. The relation of the two views will be understood by observing the positions of the hammers, which are in the same place in both photographs. These photographs, as well as some of the others that follow, were taken by Mr. John L. Gardner, 2d, for the purpose of illustrating these pages.

[10] In order to obtain this sketch, a survey was made of the delta, and from the information thus gathered a model was constructed out of clay. The dimensions of the delta are about one thousand by seven hundred feet.

[11] The bottom of the caÑon at this point is between four and five thousand feet below the flat surfaces in the foreground—a sheer descent of nearly a mile.

[12] To those who are interested in the subject of indentured labor in the tropics, the following statistics, compiled by me from official sources, may be of interest. The figures relate to British Guiana:

[13] "Senator Paddock: I should like to ask the Senator from Nevada if, in the region of country where borax is found, by reason of finding it the land in the particular State or Territory is appreciated in value on account of its existence.

"Senator Stewart: Not at all.

"Senator Paddock: The value then given to it is all in labor."—Congressional Record, July, 1890.

[14] "In America, where there has been but little serious study of taxation, the few writers of prominence are, remarkable to relate, almost all abject followers of Thiers," the French economist and statesman, who claimed to have invented the term "diffusion" of taxes.

[15] "Our conclusion is, that under actual conditions in America to-day the landowner may virtually be declared to pay in the last instance the taxes that are imposed on his land, and that at all events it is absolutely erroneous to assume any general shifting to the consumer. In so far as our land tax is a part of a general property tax, it can not possibly be shifted; in so far as it is more or less an exclusive tax, it is even then apt to remain where it is first put—on the landowner."—Seligman: Incidence of Taxation, p. 99.

[16] Seligman. Shifting and Incidence of Taxation.

[17] Professor Marshall.

[18] In a like experience the Duke of Argyll, in his work The Unseen Foundations of Society, finds an explanation of the so-called theory of Ricardo, that the rent which a farmer of agricultural land pays as the price of its hire—that is to say, the price which he pays for the exclusive use of it—is no part of the cost of the crops he may raise upon it; a conclusion that can not be possibly true, unless it be also true that rent is paid for something that is not an indispensable condition of agricultural production. "Thus rights are in their very nature impalpable and invisible. They are not material things, but relations between many material things and the human mind and will. The right of exclusive use over land is a thing invisible and immaterial, as other rights are, and, although it is, and has been since the world began, the basis of all agricultural industry, it is a basis impalpable and invisible, whereas the material visible implements and tools, whose work depends upon it, are all visible and palpable enough, and all of which would never be were we to see them without the invisible rights upon which they depend. All of the former, in their place and order, are instruments of production; all of them catch the eye, and may easily engross the attention. On the other hand, if we are induced to forget those other elements, which are equally essential instruments of production, merely because they are out of sight, then our deception may be complete, and fallacies which become glaring when memory and attention are awakened may find in our half-vacant minds an easy and even a cordial reception."

Adam Smith may be fairly considered as having fully committed himself beyond all controversy in his great work, The Wealth of Nations, to the principle that taxes, with a degree of infallibility, diffuse themselves when they are levied uniformly on the same article; and he even goes so far as to admit that a tax upon labor, if it could be uniformly levied and collected, would be diffused, and that the laborer would be the mere conduit through which the tax would pass to the public treasury. Thus he says, "While the demand for labor and the price of provisions, therefore, remain the same, a direct tax upon wages can have no other effect than to raise them somewhat higher than the tax."

The German economist Bluntschli, who has carefully studied this question of the final incidence of all just and equitable taxes, is in substantial agreement with the above conclusions, but prefers to use a different term for characterizing such finality than consumption, and expresses himself as follows: "In the end taxes fall on enjoyments. Hence the amount of each man's enjoyments and not his income is the justest measure of taxation." (Bluntschli, vol. x, p. 146.)

M. Thiers, the French statesman and economist, was also a believer and earnest advocate of the theory of the diffusion of taxes, and lays down his principles in the following words: "Taxes are shifted indefinitely, and tend to become a part of the price of commodities, to such an extent that every one bears his share, not in proportion to what he pays the state, but in proportion to what he consumes." And in his book Rights to Property he thus illustrates the method in which taxation diffuses itself: "In the same manner as our senses, deceived by appearances, tell us that it is the sun which moves and not the earth, so a particular tax appears to fall upon one class, and another tax upon another class, when in reality it is not so. The tax really best suited to the poorest member of society is that which is best suited to the general fortune of the state; a fortune which is much more for the possession and enjoyment of the poor man than it is for the rich; a fact of which we are never sufficiently convinced. But of the manner, nevertheless, in which taxes are divided among the different classes of the state, the most certain thing we can say is: That they are divided in proportion to what each man consumes, and for a reason not generally recognized or understood, namely, that taxes are reflected, as it were, to infinity, and from reflection to reflection become eventually an integral part of the prices of things. Hence the greatest purchasers and consumers are everywhere the greatest taxpayers. This is what I call 'diffusion of taxation,' to borrow a term from physical science, which applies the expression 'diffusion of light' to those numberless reflections, in consequence of which the light which has penetrated the slightest aperture spreads itself around in every direction, and in such a manner as to reach all the objects which it renders visible. So a tax which at first sight appears to be paid directly, in reality is only advanced by the individual who is first called upon to pay it."

[19] As applied to the wages of labor, the truth of this principle is equally incontestable. "The sewing girl performing her toilsome work by the needle at one dollar a day, the street sweeper working the mud with his broom at a dollar and a half, the skilled laborer at two and three dollars, the professor at five, the editor at five or ten, the artist and the songstress at ten or five hundred dollars a day are all members of the working classes, though working at different rates. And it is only the difference in their effectiveness that causes the difference in their earnings. Bring them all to the same point of efficiency, and their earnings also will be the same."—W. Jungst, Cincinnati.

John Locke, in his treatise On the Standard of Value, treats of taxation, and shows conclusively that if all lands were nominally free from taxation, the owners of lands would proportionally pay more taxes than now, because the same amount of money must continue to be collected in some form, and the average profits of lands would only be equal to the average profits of other investments; and further, that the expense and annoyance (another form of expense) would be increased if the tax were exclusively levied in the first instance upon personal property; and hence the landowner would be burdened with his proportion of the unnecessary expense and annoyance. He also shows that you may change the form of a uniform tax, but that you can not change the burden; and that the change will increase the burden, if the new system is more expensive and annoying than the old. Locke wrote nearly a century before Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations, and it would seem probable that Smith acquired his ideas relative to the average profits of investments from Locke.

[20] The meteors shown in the two ideal pictures are, of course, entirely disproportionate in size to the earth and stars. If seen by an observer above the earth, we might imagine an envelope of light around the globe from the continuous ignition of the 150,000,000,000 or more meteors which it is estimated strike the earth every year; in which case, the striking meteors would be represented in the illustrations as a thin light line surrounding the atmospheric envelope of the earth.

[21] The pessimists are further mistaken. The idea that conquest is disastrous, even to the conqueror, is much more widespread in modern societies than is generally thought. But social reflexes urge the masses to obey their chief blindly. It requires only a Gothic spirit—like Bismarck, for example—to set a whole army in motion, and make it do things which every officer and every soldier would condemn as a personal act.

[22] The difference is the extent of Alsace-Lorraine.

[23] About the extent of the British Isles, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland combined.

[24] See Seeley's Expansion of England, p. 21. This figure is very moderate. Between 1802 and 1813 France alone spent 498,000,000 francs ($99,600,000) a year. See Laroque, La Guerre et les ArmÉes permanentes, Paris, 1870, p. 203.

[25] See P. Leroy-Beaulieu, Recherches Économiques sur les Guerres contemporaines, Paris, p. 181.

[26] We may refer here to another loss which has never been thought of till now. It was long fancied that wealth could be acquired more rapidly by war than by work; consequently, conquest seeming to be the most rapid and therefore most efficacious way, was honored, and labor, appearing to be a slower process, was despised. In our days a large number of descendants of the knights of the middle ages retain the ideas of their ancestors and look upon labor as degrading. Hence thousands of aristocrats do nothing, but remain social good-for-nothings, retarding the increase of wealth by their inactivity.

[27] Sherman, in his march from Atlanta to Savannah alone, destroyed more than $400,000,000. The cotton famine occasioned by this war cost Great Britain a loss of $480,000,000. Who has ever thought of charging this against militarism?

[28] See E. Reclus, Nouvelle geographie universelle (French edition), vol. xvi, p. 810.

[29] A justification of this figure may be found in my Luttes entre les sociÉtÉs humaines, p. 220.

[30] A half million negroes are massacred every year in Africa in the tribal wars, which also are caused by the ctesohedonic fallacy. Suppose each one of them might have earned $20 a year. Capitalized at four per cent, this sum would have amounted to $400,000,000.

[31] See my Luttes, p. 228. Let us say, in passing, that we owe our existing savagery partly to the ctesohedonic fallacy. When we think that the most rapid way of enriching ourselves is by seizing our neighbor's territories, the fewer defenders that territory has, the better. So all pretended political geniuses glorify themselves on having killed the largest number of their fellow-men. CÆsar boasted of having killed a million and a half of Gauls. At the moment of writing these lines a terrible accident has occurred at Santander. Hundreds of persons were killed by the explosion of a boat loaded with dynamite. Great pity was expressed for the victims. Collections for their benefit were taken in France. Suppose France and Spain were now at war. If somebody had blown up some thousand Spaniards in a fortress, we should have sung Te Deums. Oh, man's logic!

[32] An address delivered at the Royal College of Science on October 6, 1898.

[33] Perkin. Nature, vol. xxxii, p. 334.

[34] Ch. Letourneau. Alphabet Forms in Megalithic Inscriptions. Bulletin of the Society of Anthropology, 1893.

[35] The Elements of Sociology. By Franklin Henry Giddings. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1898. Pp. 353. Price, $1.10.

[36] The Nature and Development of Animal Intelligence. By Wesley Mills, F.R.S.C. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 307. Price, $2.

[37] Four-Footed Americans and their Kin. By Mabel Osgood Wright. Edited by Frank M. Chapman. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 432, with plates. Price, $1.50.

[38] The Groundwork of Science. A Study of Epistemology. By St. George Mivart. Pp. 328. Price, $1.75. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. London; Bliss, Sands & Co.

[39] Commercial Cuba. A Book for Business Men. By William J. Clark. Illustrated. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 514, with maps.

[40] Living Plants and their Properties. A Collection of Essays. By Joseph Charles Arthur (Purdue University) and Daniel Trembly MacDougal (University of Minnesota). New York: Baker & Taylor. Minneapolis: Morris & Wilson. Pp. 234.

[41] The Study of the Child. A Brief Treatise on the Psychology of the Child, with Suggestions for Teachers, Students, and Parents. By A.R. Taylor. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (International Education Series.) Pp. 215. Price, $1.50.

[42] The Discharge of Electricity through Gases. Lectures delivered on the occasion of the Sesquicentennial Celebration of Princeton University. By J.J. Thomson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 203. Price, $1.

[43] The Story of the Mind. By James Mark Baldwin. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 232. Price, 40 cents.

[44] A Catalogue of Scientific and Technical Periodicals 1665-1895, together with Chronological Tables and a Library Check List. By Henry Carrington Bolton. Second edition. City of Washington: Published by the Smithsonian Institution. Pp. 1247.

[45] Theories of the Will in the History of Philosophy. By Archibald Alexander. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 357. Price, $1.50.

[46] Applied Physiology for Advanced Grades. Including the Effects of Alcohol and Narcotics. American Book Company. Pp. 432. Price, 80 cents.

[47] Inorganic Chemistry according to the Periodic Law. By F.P. Venable and James Lewis Howe. Easton, Pa: The Chemical Publishing Company. Pp. 266. Price, $1.50.