Disregard for Plant Life in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Lost World :: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Lost World Essays

Disregard for Plant Life in The Lost World Throughout The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle continually portrayed his characters both revering and yet mistreating the beautiful foliage around them. It was a rather strange combination of attitudes: people usually have treated the things they revere quite well, but Doyle did combine these attitudes in this writing. Â   Take the example as the group was traveling down the river. During the trip "our two professors watched every bird upon the wing, and every shrub upon the bank" (74). They even used an Assai palm as a landmark so they could find their way back to Maple White Land (75), but what did the plant life get for a thanks? "We drew them up [the canoes] and concealed them among the bushes [probably breaking quite a few branches], blazing a tree with our axes, so that we should find them again" (77). Â   This was typical of the treatment plant life received all throughout the book. It was simply thought of as a resource and not as a living entity. It was noted for its beauty, but scarred or killed the instant one felt the need. Â   There was a much better example of this sort of treatment. To get onto the impregnable Maple White Land plateau there was a lone beech tree, a native to England but not to South America, on top of a pinnacle reasonably close to the plateau. Once the pinnacle was climbed, they cut down that "fellow-countryman in a far off land" (98) to use it as a bridge into Maple White Land. Â   I cut gashes in the sides of the tree as would ensure that it would fall as we desired. . . . Finally I set to work in earnest upon the trunk, taking turn and turn with Lord John. In a little over an hour there was a loud crack, the tree swayed forward, and then crashed over, burying its branches among the bushes on the farther side. The severed trunk rolled to the very edge of our platform . . . and there was our bridge to the unknown. (99) Â   A lone beech tree, rare enough in South America, growing out of the top of a pinnacle was quite an unusual sight and a miracle of nature, but the instant it was deemed useful in some minor way, it was forced to give up its life for the sake of exploration, with no remorse for the request.