SOCIETY OF NORTHERN ILLINOIS. 303 



ture is both ancient and honorable. Pursued as a science it is 

 a most useful industry, enlarging the number and improving the 

 quality of those products of the earth that add immeasurably to 

 the satisfaction and comfort of human life. As an art it culti- 

 vates the taste, refines the sensibilities, and educates the spirit 

 in its higher realms of grace and beauty. It is a higher depart- 

 ment of agriculture, requiring a special training, a more careful 

 study. The luscious peach, the juicy apple, the strawberry that 

 in its exquisite flavor suggests the utmost limit of excellence, 

 may not afford the solid nourishmentof the wheat loaf, but they 

 enlarge the range of human enjoyment and give life a new inter- 

 est. The pansy, creeping low on the ground, its flower looking 

 up into your face as if in recognition, the climbing clematis, 

 with its exquisite shading and delicate beauty, may not fill the 

 place of the plain corn-dodger in an hour of hunger, but they 

 thrill the spirit with a new joy, and reflect upon the inmost soul 

 their own colorings of beauty. They speak a new language, and 

 tell of the far off realms of beauty, after which we all yearn. 

 Horticulture, the science and art you pursue, like music, like 

 painting, like architecture, indicates in its advancement the 

 march of civilization. In its continued and wonderful achieve- 

 ments, it is contributing to the enlargement and wealth of human 

 life. Each fruit made choicer or more plentiful as a luxury for 

 our tables, each flower made more perfect by your skill, each 

 shrub and tree that shows a more graceful sweep of its boughs, 

 or a richer foliage under improved cultivation, touches a higher 

 range of sensibilities, reaches purer and better impulses, expands 

 the meaning of life. First in the order of things must come the 

 prime necessities of existence, and next should come its finer 

 equipments, its more elegant adornments. There is a natural 

 hunger that must first be satisfied, but there yet remains a hunger 

 of the spirit that yearns for a better nourishment. In these 

 surroundings and embellishments of life, secured to us by your 

 skillful, patient work are we cultivated into a higher apprecia- 

 tion of beauty, and the chords of our spirits attuned to higher 

 harmonies. 



As leaders in this department of the world's varied activities, 

 as captains in this division of the great army of progress, we bid 

 you welcome. This earth that waits for man's coming grows 

 fairer as you go and yields choicer products from its bosom, 

 Nature is exhaustless in her resources, magnificent in her riches, 

 and bids the touch of skillful fingers to unlock her treasures 

 and reveal her unrivalled loveliness. Her flowering and her 

 fruitage to-day are but the prophecies of what she will disclose 

 in the coming years, when your persuasive caresses have tempted 

 her to fuller revelations of her boundless possibilities. 



If you can stimulate us to a higher ambition in this line of 

 effort, if you will leave us some word of truth that will help us 



