SECOND ANNUAL BANQUET. 45 
so guarded by force that the grand flora of the United 
States, there springing as high as the head of a man on 
horseback, may once more bloom and not be made the 
herbage for the sheep from Mexico. I propose, in the 
spirit that I felt this afternoon when walking beneath the 
shade of the old Garden, to gain some inspiration for my- 
self, if I must be an officer, from that man’s soul who here 
said, as has been so eloquently alluded to by both the 
speakers this evening, ‘‘ I want to educate mankind in the 
nature of the trees, the wonderful resources of the flowers 
of the earth, and I want them to cultivate them as the 
friends God gave them to have for their good. Do not 
waste them. Do not let the saw and the woodman’s axe 
cut down all of them until your plains become deserts, but 
say, in all these great regions we will preserve, in recogni- 
tion of that divine hand that made them, these the friends 
of our human family.’? And I thought another thing. I 
am not, I believe, in your estimation, a very devotional 
man; but it did seem to me as I walked among those 
flowers and those beautiful trees in Shaw’s Garden that if 
in that other land there is a place of beauty where the 
sun ever shines and the flowers ever bloom, the paths 
through which this great man shall pass will be the brightest 
from the bloom and the sweetest from the fragrance, of 
those trodden by any man that has gone from among us to 
that greater realm. 
Professor George Lawson, of Dalhousie University, the 
Secretary for Agriculture of Nova Scotia, then responded 
to a call from the Chair, his remarks including the fol- 
lowing : — 
You are all more familiar than I can be with the bequest 
of Mr. Shaw and the circumstances attending it, and it has 
been very eloquently referred to here to-night. I, there- 
fore, need not refer to that except in this way: that [ 
regard Mr. Shaw’s bequest not as a mere gift of a magnifi- 
cent garden and grounds to the City of St. Louis; but I 
