230 STATE BOAED OF AGRICULTUKE. 



she was shearing her sheep that she might the better reproduce them on canvas, 

 when an admiring artist from over the sea called to give himself the pleasure 

 of seeing so gifted and celebrated an artist. She accompanied him to the par- 

 lor, furnished him with subjects of entertainment, and begged him to excuse her 

 absence till she might finish shearing a sheep that she had left begun. I may 

 say quite positively that your speaker little thought when starting in her hum- 

 ble way four years ago, with a few fowls in a log house ten by ten, and then 

 gradually enlarging as their wants made it necessary, and lately introducing 

 them to more comfortable appointments, unheralded by pen or friend, that her 

 modest work would ever introduce her to so high an honor as the present, — 

 standing here to speak to the sovereigns of the land, for such is the intelligent, 

 Avell-read farmer. 



The sentiment, when general society shall have become wiser, will doubtless 

 become universally approved, that familiarity with the most humble occupations 

 of agricultural life is not inconsistent with the highest refinement of taste and 

 the most improved culture of the mind and manners. 



The world is full of unspeakable loveliness, and '''eyes annointed read" the 

 glories of a creation over which "the morning stars sang together." 



Living in the outer Avorld as the farmer does, and whose wife and daughter 

 may, they can study nature in all her varied forms of figure, shades of color, 

 strains of music. Her mountain landscape pointing heavenward, and the mighty 

 forest depths quivering in the breeze and howling in the tempest ; all these 

 grand, ennobling, and ever varying sights and sounds is but a part of the glo- 

 rious entertainment which nature grants her worshippers. These are blessed 

 influences which grace the soul with a perennial bloom which will grow more 

 and more beautiful as the ages of eternity roll on. These sublime influences 

 inspired genius in all the past. The ' ' Landsca2:)e Pieces" of Claude Lorraine, 

 the "Pastoral Symphonies" of Beethoven, the sublime description of a thun- 

 der storm on the Mediterranean sea by the " Sweet Psalmist of Israel," are but 

 so many gems, each of its kind wrought out by a close, admiring, and loving 

 converse with nature. 



Address by Prof. ^V. W. Tracy : 



"seeds: their foemation and deyelopmeis't." 



No one has failed to notice the variety in the flora of every country. The 

 woods on a single acre are rarely all of the same species, and underneath them 

 all we find an ever-varying, ever-changing carpet of small plants, which grow 

 up and bloom and die, only to be replaced by others. The number of known 

 species is variously estimated by different botanists at from 90,000 to 130,000, 

 and Avhile some of them (like that most beautiful of orchids, Bisa grandiflora, 

 which grows naturally only on Table mountains near the cape of Good Hope) 

 are confined to very narrow limits ; others are found almost everywhere, like 

 the silver Aveed {PotentiUa anserina), which grows so abundantly about our bay, 

 and is found not only in Grand Traverse, but everywhere to the east of us from 

 Pennsylvania to Greenland, to the west from Oregon to Behring's straits, while 

 it is common all over Europe from the Mediterranean to the Arctic sea, and in 

 Asia everywhere north of the Altai range of mountains. AVhen we consider the 

 millions upon millions of individuals comprising some species, and tliat if all 

 of the possible descendants of many single plants should grow, in a few years they 

 alone would more than occupy every inch of the land, we do not wonder at the fact 

 of this \ariety, and are prepared for the statement of Flint, that over thirty dis- 



