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Rediscovering England

Abstract

BACK we must and without delay. This book has an arresting value as a meritorious and attractive attempt to develop and encourage an interest in the countryside, now fast being buried in bungalows, tarmac, petrol pumps and pill signs; its matchless beauty by-passed out of existence everywhere, even in far Glencoe; the life-blood of its once majestic trees drained away to river and sea (seen in Greenwich Park and infested elm areas); incidentially; the phosphates are sent awash. A couple of thousand years hence, perhaps, England will be rediscovered and disinterred, like Herculaneum, by its curious Mongolian possessors, who will write books, like Flinders Petrie's, in which they discuss the overwhelming evidence they have found of a once glorious civilisation becoming rapidly decadent, owing to the introduction of a debased religion, which had led to the entire neglect of the natural and the worship of brazened gods called machines. This, at the hands of a selfish, commercialised priesthood of engine-makers, working to enslave man and make him unnecessary, burying him in the pit and the town and binding him to rivers of water and of oil, instead of inspiring him to fall down upon and worship the soil from which alone he comes and can gain sustenance.

Rediscovering England.

By Charlotte A. Simpson. Pp. 360. (London: Ernest Benn, Ltd., 1931.) 21s. net.

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ARMSTRONG, H. Rediscovering England . Nature 129, 112–115 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129112a0

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