304 TRANSACTIONS OP THE HORTICULTURAL 



in our work, your presence with us will have brought its full 

 recompense. Again, as the representatives of Northern Illinois 

 in this mission of love and faith, in behalf of the city of Sand- 

 wich and its surrounding population, I bid you welcome. 



The President responded briefly in behalf of the Society, after 

 which Professor Cook read his paper entitled 



HORTICULTURE IN SCHOOLS. 

 Ladies and Gentlemen: 



I live in a city whose motto is "Urbs in horto," a city in a 

 garden, but fortunately my dwelling place and the school with 

 which I am connected are in the garden part of it. 



With us of the annexed portion of Chicago, the motto might 

 more appropriately be, "Hortus in urbe" a garden in a city. 

 Horticulture and the schools are in close proximity in that city 

 whose motto is not an unapt one. The present paper is only in- 

 cidentally written for this occasion. It is rather the product of 

 an idea changing to an opinion, and then to a firm belief after an 

 experience of twenty-one years in high school teaching. 



Our schools can and ought to have a more practical scientific 

 side than they have presented to the public in the past. The 

 schools absolutely need an experimental field. Horticulture, like 

 all other occupations that would be in line with the march of 

 progress, needs experimental development. These remarks are 

 not addressed to those teachers who know that they already know 

 all there is to be known in regard to the improvement of the 

 schools, nor yet to those market gardeners who will not permit 

 themselves to understand the difference between a cucumber and 

 a pickle. They are addressed to this body of earnest men and 

 women whose very presence attests the fact that practical im- 

 provement will be heartily welcomed. They are addressed to a 

 class, of whom Francis A. Walker says in an article in the Prince- 

 ton Iieview, "they are unlike the cultivators of the soil in any 

 country of Europe except Switzerland, and perhaps Scotland: 

 they have at no stage of our history constituted a peasantry in 

 any sense of the term. The actual cultivators of the soil here 

 have been the same kind of men precisely as those who filled 

 the professions or were engaged in commercial and mechanical 

 pursuits. Of two sons of the same mother, one became alawyer, 

 perhaps, or a judge, or went to the city and became a merchant, or 

 gave himself to political affairs and became a Governor or went 

 to Congress ; the other stayed upon the ancestral homestead or 

 made a new one for himself and his children out of the public 

 domain farther west, remaining through his life a plain, hard 

 working farmer. And those who have come to us from foreign 

 countries have caught the time, the step, and the spirit of the 



