ABSTRACT

The American national park idea, conceived in 1872, spread over much of the rest of the world in the next fifty or seventy-five years, but only in two countries, Canada and New Zealand, have developments been on anything like the American scale. Significantly these two countries, like the United States, were sparsely populated and wealthy enough to afford the luxury of large national parks, reasonably well administered and protected. In most European and Asiatic countries, and most of those south of the Rio Grande, the needs of dense populations have prevented the withdrawal of large areas of land, and sometimes national poverty has made efficient administration impossible.