STATE HOKTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 137 



Flowers, the most beautiful part of the vegetable kingdom, have 

 been altered and improved by scientific culture. The habits of many 

 have become so different as to have almost lost their identity. Sin- 

 gle flowers have been made double, large flowers dwarfed, and colors 

 changed. For example, the Hydrangea, which is white or pink in 

 our common cultivation, may be made blue by using a strong ferru- 

 gineous earth. Other changes can be made by chemical mixtures of 

 the soil. 



Another example is of a plant sent in 1874, by a French Bishop 

 of Canton, China, to Paris, the flower of which changes its color 

 three times a day. The Bishop speaks of it as an evidence of Chi- 

 nese art in leading nature out of her customary paths. Again, we 

 learn that the modern age is not the original in changing flowers by 

 cultivation. In the old Laurium silver mines of Europe, that were 

 abandoned fifteen hundred years ago, recent prospecting has uncov- 

 ered soils, buried deep in schists and scoria for two thousand years, 

 from which has sprung up flowers, some of an unknown and some of 

 a well-known species, both double and single, which have been de- 

 cided by botanists to have been flowers cultivated by the ancients. 

 Between two and three thousand years ago Flora was worshiped. 

 Annually the citizens of Rome met and offered sacrifice to her, that 

 their plants and trees might flourish. Ever since that time mankind 

 have had their methods of worshiping her. At the present, one of 

 our floral festivals is the first of May, when a beautiful girl is 

 crowned as '"May Queen," or the Goddess of Flowers. 



There is a point to be kept in mind by any whose mind runs on 

 the many productions of nature, and that is, the unexpected uses to 

 which material, animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, can be 

 turned. The ancients, who let the dogs run wild to do the work of 

 city scavengers, never imagined that dogs would, in after days, be- 

 come the cherished pets and companions of refined ladies. When 

 paper was first manufactured who thought of its becoming material 

 for water-buckets, fire-proof chimneys, pianos and car-wheels. 



The influences which determine our personal character and des- 

 tiny, the accidents as it seems to us, which change our purpose and 

 lead us to this or that pursuit, frequently appear to us very insignif- 

 icant in themselves. A plant in a window may change the current 

 of our thoughts and quicken us to new existence. A bright flower 

 or its delicious odor may lead us in paths we had no thought to en- 

 ter; and those paths are surely pleasantness which leads us to deal 

 with what, for lack of a better expression we will call nature's fancy 

 u'orl-; and thus in close association with the fairest is taught "To 

 look from nature up to nature's God." 



A suitable employment for women agitates the mind of many 

 of our great thinkers. Some of their theories have a radical ten- 

 dency in one direction, some in another; while all agree that she is 

 the equal of man it does not follow that she is the same, or must be 

 employed as he is. 



