over 10,000 acres, including the Blue Hill reservation
(about 5000 acres), the highest land in eastern Massachusetts, a
beautiful reservation of forest, crag and pond known as Middlesex Fells,
two large beach bath reservations on the harbour at Revere and Hull
(Nantasket), and the boating section of the Charles river. At the end of
1907 more than $13,000,000 had been expended on the system. Including
the local parks of the cities and towns of the metropolitan district
there are over 17,000 acres of pleasure grounds within the metropolitan
park district. Boston was the pioneer municipality of the country in the
establishment of open-air gymnasiums. A great improvement, planned for
many years, was brought nearer by the completion of the new Cambridge
Bridge. This improvement was projected to include the damming of the
Charles river, and the creation of a great freshwater basin, with
drive-ways of reclaimed land along the shores, and other adornments,
somewhat after the model of the Alster basins at Hamburg.

_Art and Literature._--The Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1870
(though there were art exhibits collected from 1826 onward) and its
present building was erected in 1908. It has one of the finest
collections of casts in existence, a number of original pieces of Greek
statuary, the second-best collection in the world of Aretine ware, the
finest collection of Japanese pottery, and probably the largest and
finest of Japanese paintings in existence. Among the memorials to men of
Massachusetts (a large part of them Bostonians) commemorated by
monuments in the Common, the Public Garden, the grounds of the state
house, the city hall, and other public places of the city, are statues
of Charles Sumner, Josiah Quincy and John A. Andrew by Thomas Ball; of
Generals Joseph Hooker and William F. Bartlett, and of Rufus Choate by
Daniel C. French; of W.L. Garrison and Charles Devens by Olin L. Warner;
of Samuel Adams by Anne Whitney; of John Winthrop and Benjamin Franklin
by R.S. Greenough; of Edward Everett (W.W. Story), Colonel W. Prescott
(Story), Horace Mann (E. Stebbins), Daniel Webster (H. Powers), W.E.
Channing (H. Adams), N.P. Banks (H.H. Kitson), Phillips Brooks (A. St
Gaudens), and J.B. O'Reilly (D.C. French).

Among other important monuments are a group by J.Q.A. Ward
commemorating the first proof of the anaesthetic properties of ether,
made in 1846 in the Massachusetts General Hospital by Dr W.T.G.
Morton; an emancipa