98 MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



Descriptions of plants for dictionaries or other purposes is not pos- 

 sible, without some knowledge of botany. 



In Morton's Cj'clopedia of Agriculture, nearly one-fourth of the text 

 consists of descriptions of useful and ornamental plants by botanists. 

 The preface contains this comment: '"The comparative quality and pro- 

 ductiveness of the different kinds of wheat, barley, oats, together with 

 the successive introduction of new species from other countries, have 

 so connected the researches of the botanist with the interest of the 

 farmer, that to no science, historically speaking, is the agriculture of 

 this country so deeply indebted as to botany." 



Who have written on the science or the theory of horticulture? Such 

 men as Dr. John Lindley, President Knight, of London, Maxwell T. 

 Masters, all of England, botanists of more or less repute. 



Who suggest the most intelligent and valuajble horticultural experi- 

 ments? Lindley, Knight, Darwin and other botanists. 



Who experiment, select, and test grasses and clovers? No one can 

 make much progress unless he be a botanist. Even stock breeders are 

 often ignorant of most grasses. 



Who have -found out the life history of our minute plants, known as 

 parasitic fungi, and bacteria, which are so_ numerous and destructive 

 that they take rank in their depredations along side of the hosts of 

 injurious insects? Such men as Farlow, Burrill, Bessey, Arthur, Gallo- 

 way, Erwin F. Smith and others. Those men show as clearly as the 

 noonday sun can show anything, that wheat rust, potato rot, pear 

 blight, corn smut, and many other so called plant diseases, are the 

 result of minute ijarasitic plants which rob the host plants of their 

 protoplasm and starch. 



Who, not a botanist, could ever have imagined half of the bright 

 thoughts stated by Asa Gray in his essay in the Transactions of the 

 American Pomological Society in 1873: "Were the fruits made for 

 man, or did man make the fruits?" Here, among other things, he dis- 

 cusses what our pomology would have been if the civilization from which 

 it, and we ourselves, have sprung had had its birthplace along the south- 

 ern shores of our great lakes, the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, 

 and the intervening Mississippi, instead of the Levant, Mesopotamia 

 and the Nile, and our old world had been open to us as a new world, 

 less than four hundred years ago. 



Who, except the botanist — Darwin — could have written two of the 

 most suggestive and valuable works ever published as guides to the 

 horticulturist? These are, first: ''Animals and Plants Under Domes- 

 tication;" second, and in my opinion most valuable of all books to the 

 educated horticulturist. "The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilization in 

 the Vegetable Kingdom." 



The former is the easier to understand and the more popular — it has 

 been much read and quoted, and has already made a lasting impression 

 on horticulture; the latter has yet apparently scarcely produced an im- 

 pression, and was undoubtedly written in advance of the times. 



The Gardeners' Chronical remarked, upon the advent of this latter 

 book, — The Effect of Cross and Self-Fertilization in the Vegetable 

 Kingdom: "For our horticultural readers the great value of Mr. Dar- 

 win's last work consists, in the practical applications which follow 

 from the author's very numerous, protracted and laborious experiments, 



