Repobts of Local Societies. 253 



incapable of cultivating flowers. Hence we find in the large 

 manorial estates of England three grades of gardeners — those 

 who cultivate vegetables, those who cultivate fruit, and those 

 who cultivate flowers. Those who are devoted to veofetables 

 receive the smallest wages, those who attend to fruit a little 

 more, but those who cultivate flowers a really good salary, which, 

 with care, in many cases becomes a fortune. Those who culti- 

 vate vegetables are young farm laborers with little or no educa- 

 tion, men of brawn rather than brain; those who are devoted to 

 fruit are the experienced vegetable growers, and those who 

 cultivate flowers are often learned botanists and skillful enofi- 

 neers. Say what we may, it certainly requires more mind to 

 grow a geranium than a potato, a lily than an onion. He 

 who cultivates flowers increases unconsciously in intelligence. 

 Mind is developed by attention to every plant. Knowledge of 

 its origin comes and takes the thoughts over all the world. One 

 is the better for knowing that the dahlia is a developed potato, 

 that it is indigenous to Peru, and that it was evolved from the 

 one to the other amid the snow and ice of Norway by a man 

 named Dahl; that the delicious stock was once a cabbage, and 

 might have gone to sauer kraut but for our French cousins, 

 who, bye the bye, are not always so successful in winning the 

 delights of our Teuton neiirhbors; that the sunflower might 

 have remained tobacco to cloud the brain of youth and stain the 

 teeth of men, or else continued an artichoke, but for a merciful 

 interposition of Providence, which, in the one case, would save 

 men, and, in the other, enable us to save our bacon. They also 

 develop patience. "The greatest of all great things is pa- 

 tience," and in the culture of flowers one has to labor and to 

 wait. 



3 Flowers are useful in the formation of a correct taste. We 

 do sometimes see men, and I am sorry to add women, ill-dressed, 

 over-dressed, unbecomingly dressed, slovenly dressed; but it is 

 never so with a flower. The sense which we call taste comes 

 largely from them. You will observe that Christmas and Easter 

 cards which are doing so much to form right ideas of beauty in 

 the minds of the masses are almost entirely floral. You will 



