A YELLOWSTONE OF THE ALPS

The world has been watching to see what the Fascisti Premier would do to settle the troubled internal condition of Italy. Immediately upon taking office Signor Mussolini plunged into the Italian struggle against bankruptcy by planning a series of public works on a grand scale. Among his schemes, one which will be watched with great interest by Americans is the forming of a Yellowstone Park in the Italian Alps for the protection of the Alpine birds and animals.

In Europe the National Park idea is an innovation. The royal game preserves have kept from extinction several species of wild game like the bouquetin corresponding to our mountain goat; but the formation of a National Park has been hailed all over Italy with enthusiasm.

What has been accomplished in the United States by the development of National Parks, Monuments and Forests is well-known, and the idea is constantly spreading. The Director of the National Park Service has proposed the creation of several new reservations and constructive work in the parks already existing is going on steadily. The most recent step forward is the passage of a law in Vermont putting a protecting arm around certain wild flowers as the rest of the country is already protecting game. Vermont thus constitutes itself a sort of state wide sanctuary for the wild flowers which are fast disappearing elsewhere under the uprooting hand of the automobile picnicker, and, in the case of the May flower, of the professional marketer as well.

In Italy the Premier's new Park will come barely in time to preserve the European brown bear, which has disappeared almost entirely, even from the district over which it has been the presiding deity, the Swiss canton of Berne. The great European vulture, the lammergeier, which has come down through history with the accumulated guilt of centuries for the crime of killing Aeschylus by dropping on his head a tortoise, is also in danger of extinction.

The new Alpine Park would fulfil its purpose if it served only to keep in the world such living kindred as are left of the "side-hill gauger," the "Gyoscutus", and the "four-toed boneless partridge of the Alps.