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MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 



gray sage brush and the brown coloring and where grasses 

 rarely mat themselves into sod or sward, back to the trees 

 of groves and woods, back to lawns and meadows, and 

 where God makes green '< grass to grow upon the mount- 

 ains," and "herbs" and fruits '<for the use of men." 

 Is it any wonder that the imaginative Greeks peopled their 

 forests with the Dryad nymphs making their lives to be a 

 very part of the life of the trees, and in their metamor- 

 phoses changed the noble youth Narcissus into the flower, 

 and the beautiful maiden Daphne into the laurel shrub ? 



Our Blessed Lord gave honor to the vegetable world. 

 It is a sweet touch of His sympathy with the innocent pleas- 

 ures of men, that when He miraculously fed the five thou- 

 sand he commanded them, tired as they were with much 

 walking and long fasting, to sit down upon the grass. 

 " There was much grass in the place," says one evangelist. 

 It was *' green grass " says another. Whose heart cannot 

 gratefully respond to the tender touch of loving kindness 

 in the Master, as He bids, sit down upon the grass? Again 

 and again He enforces His teaching by illustrations drawn 

 from vegetable nature. The sower going forth to sow,— 

 the seed springing up one knoweth not how, — the mustard 

 growth,— the wheat and tares,— the vine and vineyard 

 over and over again, —the barren fig tree,— the other 

 fruitless tree cumbering the ground and deserving to be cut 

 down, — these indicate that the Divine eye looking forth 

 takes in the truth and gives it out again, that the vegetable 

 world of God's appointment is well known by man, and 

 intimately associated with him, and wondrously helpful to 

 his life and development. And one may be permitted to 

 remark that when Our Lord institutes the Holy Sacrament 

 for the ever to be continued memorial of His sacrifice upon 

 the Cross, Ho takes from the vegetable kingdom the typical 

 elements, strengthening bread and cheering wine, and passes 

 by the animal kingdom, altho' the blood and flesh of a 

 lamb had constantly done service in the sacred Paschal 

 rites precedent. On a mountain, or what we would call a 



