The well-accepted practice of planting
trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has
been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the
heavily wooded areas; so that it is by no means unusual for a
village or a farmer in the wooded country to clear the land of
its native trees and immediately replant saplings of certain
introduced varieties about the farmyard or along the streets. In
this way a forest growth of oak, elm, beech, butternut, hemlock,
basswood, and birch is cleared off to give room for saplings of
soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is felt that the
inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would
derogate from the dignity that should invest an article which is
intended to serve a decorative and honorific end.
The like pervading guidance of taste by pecuniary repute is
traceable in the prevalent standards of beauty in animals. The
part played by this canon of taste in assigning her place in the
popular aesthetic scale to the cow has already been spokes of.
Something to the same effect is true of the other domestic
animals, so far as they are in an appreciable degree industrially
useful to the community -- as, for instance, barnyard fowl, hogs,
cattle, sheep, goats, draught-horses.
Pages:
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187