STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 57 



oi gainirig information from you. This you have kindly allowed him 



to do. 



As a slight return for your many favors, he can not be so churlish as 

 to refuse the contribution of his mite to your treasury of knowledge. 



When we look around us upon the beautiful panorama of natural 

 objects, everywhere spread over the surface of the globe, we can not fail 

 to be struck with the wonderful variety of objects that present themselves 

 on every side. Among these, we, horticulturists, will very noturally 

 observe and study the various plants that spring from the soil beneath 

 our feet. These we find to be infinite in numbers, and of wonderful 

 variety in form and coloring, as well as in size and habits. Some appear to 

 be adapted to almost every kind of soil and climate, except to the regions of 

 perpetual congelation. Even the arctic snows have their pervading 

 whiteness enlivened by the warm and lovely tints of the proto-coccus^ 

 one of the simplest forms of vegetable tissue, which, though consisting 

 of a single cell, compensates for its primitive organism by the immense 

 numbers which are associated together. 



Some plants are found only in the waters of ponds, or lakes, or 

 rivers; others find a congenial home in the briny deep itself Some, on 

 the contrary, cling to the dead bark of trees, or to the barren surface of 

 the granite and oSier rocks, where the mosses and lichens find a foothold, 

 while they are sustained by the atmosphere. These are low orders of 

 plant life, to be sure, but plants they are, nevertheless, and they are des- 

 tined to play an important role in the economy of the universe, while, in 

 the tropics, the damp and heated atmosphere of the forests sustains 

 innumerable varieties of the most curious air-plants, many of which are 

 famous for their large, richly-colored, wonderfully-shaped, and curiously- 

 contrived flowers of rare beauty. Some vegetable forms feed exclusively 

 upon living vegetable tissues. We find plants, chiefly upon the earth, 

 supported by the soil, which, in the course of ages, has accumulated upon 

 the surface of the globe, either by the residuum from the solution and 

 removal of other portions of the subjacent rocks, or by the grinding force 

 of ice and water reducing them to mud, and by the transportation of 

 currents; in all cases, it is more or less affected, too, in its constitution 

 by the decay of vegetable and animal matters, fitting it especially for the 

 highest development of the numerous plants with which it is almost 

 universally clothed. 



Thus we find three of the great elements of the ancient philosophers 

 are capable of sustaining vegetable life; the air and the water, as well 

 as the earth, teem with plants. Among them all, we must be struck, 

 even upon a casual examination, with the wonderful display of creative 

 genius which they furnish, with the exquisite beauty which many of 

 them present, with the remarkable order of their gradations — making a 

 perfect classification possible, witli their adaptation to the circums'ances 

 by which they are surrounded, and hence, with the manifest design or 

 purpose for which they were created. 



It is, however, with those plants that are nourished in the soil, that 

 we, as horticulturists, are particularly interested ; and among these we 

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