VALLEY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 271 



ESSAYS. 



Chair called upon Mr. A. H. Burt, one of the regular essayists, 

 who read the following 



PAPER ON FLORICULTURE. 

 BY A. H. BURT. 



The indifference with which some people regard the beauty of 

 nature indicates the lack of one of the mental functions from which 

 may be derived a pure and exquisitely^ agreealjle ])leasure. 



The desire for what is ornament is legitimate, even the 

 heights and breadths of its development through cultivation. 



The strict utilitarian who touches nothing but what will turn 

 into money, has his own species of enjoyment, but is not the kind 

 that smooths the wrinkles on the brow of age, and yields to its re- 

 tirement agreeable food for reflection. 



He who uses in his business life the hours that mind and body 

 demand for recreation, contracts the possilnlities of his happiness. 

 Some men consider flowers trash. They can see beauty in trees, in 

 the fields of waving grain, in the carpet of green that covers meadow 

 and pasture, but 'tis beauty born from the conciousness that the 

 golden grain means dollars; the tree is shade, comfort and fruit; the 

 grass is fine steers, butter, milk — it means dollars. The dollars are 

 useful in the economy of exchange; they are convenient and a source 

 of pleasure. 



But there are other considerations which sharpen enjoyment: 

 among them are the investigations in the great arcana of nature. 

 The real benefactors of the world are those men who never had 

 wealth for an object, who did not look for money in the unheaved 

 rocks and ledges — formations of the ages; but they unfolded the 

 mysteries of the pre- historic eye, and this knowledge helps to satisfy 

 one of the wants of the race. He who devoted his life to the dangers 

 and privations of forest and flood, that he might know the animals 

 of earth, their habits and history, was not after money; but he gave 

 the world's scientists facts from which grew evolutions, — the relations 

 of growth. He was the ])ioneer of data that agitates the literary 

 moralists of the world. 



Like the zoological hunter was the ornithologist; for months 

 alon^ with nature and the birds. The geographer devoted his life in 

 searching new lands, not for money; — succeeding generations reaped 

 the reward — he, too often, a posthumous honor. 



And the botanist, was he searching among the flowers for gold? 

 Did he examine stem and petal, leaf, fibre, root and rootlet for money? 

 It was a higher reward that spurred him on. We have results of his 

 observation and labor. 



