, = 
BANQUET TO GARDENERS. 61 
would have made no appreciable impression on the stu- 
pendous task. 
Some of these compounds are explosives. Some are 
medicines, which produce special effects on animals. Some 
are poisons. Some are fatal to insects and harmless to 
vertebrates. Here is a vast store-house, with material for 
unending progress. Some of this material, some of this 
labor, some of this progress, is for you. We are fortu- 
nate, that in our city has lived a man who has founded an 
institution broad enough for your highest and best needs. 
I know that the strongest men of our time have turned 
their eyes in our direction. They predict that the institu- 
tion which Mr. Shaw founded will do great things for 
science and for human welfare. 
The Chairman: ‘‘A cottage and a slip of ground for a 
cabbage and a gooseberry bush,’’ says Horace Walpole in 
his essay on modern taste in gardening, ‘‘ were in all prob- 
ability the earliest seats and gardens: a well and bucket 
succeeded to the Pison and Euphrates. As settlements in- 
ereased, the orchard and the vineyard followed; and the 
earliest princes of tribes possessed just the necessaries of a 
modern farmer.’’ To the landscape gardener is due much 
credit for the transformation of many a waste and many 
an unattractive piece of ground, into a miniature reproduc- 
tion of that Eden from which our first ancestors are said to 
have been driven forth to eat their bread in the sweat of 
their brow, in an effort to compel unwilling Nature to yield 
them sustenance. To the unselfish work of the horticult- 
urist and the landscape gardener, is directly attributable 
all that makes rural life attractive to any but the sportsman. 
We have with us this evening one who has devoted his 
life to this work of making homes and improving their sur- 
roundings, and who, in connection with one of the gentle- 
men who has already spoken, has done much to inculcate a 
love of the beautiful in nature in our children, by making 
