GARDENS IN JAPAN.

New Zealand Mail, 20 August 1902, Page 5 (Supplement)

GARDENS IN JAPAN.

The picturesque customs of our new allies, the Japanese, are disposed in a very interesting article in “Pearson’s Magazine,” by Mr Stafford Ransbme. riting on Japanese gardens, the author says:— “Japanese gardens, like the Japanese houses, always puzzle the foreigner. I was long in realising their meaning and beauty, and the theories on which they are based. On my first arrival, I went to see what I was told was one of the most beautiful gardens in Tokyo.—and returned from my visit imagining that

ill, the lake, and the ouriously-shaped trees, that I realised that Japanese gardening was a fine art, with aims very different to our own. For that teahouse was in the centre of the busiest part of Tokyo, and there were houses all around it.. The landscape before me was, in reality, surrounded by buildings. These were gone. The gardener had 'Jotted them out. The depth, which I saw with my own eyes, was not there, for the ‘landscape’ was actually no larger than a full-sized tennis court. “A Japanese gardener does not strive after bright colours; lie does not lay out beds mechanically, or seek the trim, the artificial. His object is to counterfeit a natural scene as

within its mass has always formed a fascinating problem, not to the chemist only, but to the commercial speculator as well. Everybody admits that an immense quantity of the precious metal amist be held in solution, as it were, in the oceans of the globe, but that it would pay mankind to be at the expense of securing it is, of course, quite another matter. Still it is quite likely that despite the scientific difficulties in the way of extracting the oceanic gold, many mouths will water at the statement made by Professor Lupton. of Leeds, who, speaking at the annual meeting of' the Institution of Mining Engineers recently, declared that, according to his estimate of the amount of gold in the sea, there was sufficient to give six mill'ons sterling to every man, woman ami child on the face of the earth.— “Daily Chronicle”