Contempt for Plant Life in The Lost World Throughout The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle continually portrayed his characters as revering and yet mistreating beautiful foliage that surrounded them. It was a rather strange combination of attitudes: people usually treat the things they revere quite well, but Doyle combined these attitudes in this writing. Let's take the example while the group was traveling along the river. During the journey "our two professors observed every bird on the wing and every shrub on the shore" (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 in return? “We hauled them up [the canoes] and hid them in the bushes [probably breaking quite a few branches], setting fire to a tree with our axes, so as to find them” (77). This was typical of the life purifier received throughout the book. It was simply thought of as a resource and not a living entity. He was known for his beauty, but was scarred or killed the instant the need arose. There was a much better example of this type of treatment. To reach the impregnable plateau of Maple White Land there was a lone beech tree, native to England but not South America, atop a pinnacle reasonably close to the plateau. Once they scaled the pinnacle, they cut down that "countryman in a distant land" (98) to use as a bridge to the Land of Maple White. I cut holes in the sides of the tree to make sure it would fall. as we wanted. . . . I finally got down to serious work on the trunk, taking turns with Lord John. After just over an hour a loud crash was heard, the tree swayed forward and then toppled over, burying its branches in the bushes on the far side. The severed log rolled to the edge of our platform. . . and there was our bridge to the unknown. (99)A solitary beech tree, quite rare in South America, growing from the top of a pinnacle was a rather unusual sight and a miracle of nature, but the instant it was deemed useful in any way, it was forced to give up his life for the sake of exploration, with no remorse for the request.