SOCIETY OP CENTRAL ILLINOIS. 253 



ing grain, dotted here and there with horses and cattle, orchards 

 and groves, and tasty houses from which children were going to 

 school. And if we could look within I trust we would find 

 books, magazines and music. I could but think, why should any 

 one who has a home in Illinois leave it for Oklahoma or Florida, 

 and I said to myself unless Paradise is on earth one need not leave 

 Illinois to search for Elysian fields. 



But let us return to the subject of the meeting. The members 

 of this Society are from New England, Ohio, Indiana and Ken- 

 tucky, and as a matter of course each one remembers his favor- 

 ite fruits, and it has taken years to convince them that the trees 

 so good at home could be a failure in Illinois : and thus the first 

 lesson in horticulture in Illinois was to unlearn the lessons learned 

 at home, and when the trees began to succumb they began to cry 

 out that horticulture in Illinois was a failure. The adage that 

 "experience is a dear school," is just as true now as ever, but 

 what remedy can we urge? — Systematic experience with thor- 

 ough results. The State Board asked for an appropriation and 

 failed, but tried again and with favorable results. The State 

 Board may outline work, but tests must come from producers. 

 The Board must look well to what experiments they undertake. 

 While the State Societies have their work to do, the local So- 

 cieties also have their part, and in every state why might we not 

 have a monthly report to the State Society? The Grange was 

 a good thing in some ways, but when they turned into bankers 

 and railroad men, they killed the goose that laid the golden egg. 



But I am taking up your time, and will close, asking every one 

 to help make this a profitable meeting. 



On motion, Mr. Minier, Mr. Browne and Mr. Vickroy were ap- 

 pointed a committee on the President's Address. 



EXPERIMENTAL HORTICULTURE. 



BY PROF. T. J. BURRILL, CHAMPAIGN. 



Horticulture is by no means a modern art, if we use the word 

 in a very general sense, for every nation and people of which 

 history tells have appreciated fruits if not flowers, the edible 

 things of a garden if not the ornamental features of a lawn and 

 of a landscape. Many of the kinds of plants we cultivate were 

 in use at the dawn of history. Of the origin of quite a number 

 of them we are still ignorant, no wild specimens of them having 

 ever been known to civilized man. Onions, and beans, and cab- 

 bages, oranges, and apples and grapes had an existence as culti- 

 vated plants before letters were invented, and before man as an 

 individual had legal possession of land. There were, too, in the 

 remote past, enthusiasts in the appreciation and admiration of 

 the plants to which we owe the existence of our society and 



