'8 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



As members of the State Horticultural Society, we have come from our homes 

 in distant parts of the State, to meet with you and receive as well as to impart 

 information, to improve our store of knowledge, and thus prepare for more efficient 

 work in the tield of horticulture by an exchange of ideas gathered from our varied 

 experiences, our successes and our failures in the pursuit of an art instituted by 

 God Himself, who, immediately after the work of creation, planted a garden east- 

 ward in Eden, in which he made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight 

 and good for food, the tree of life in the midst of it, and a river went out of Eden 

 to water the garden. When all was perfected, man was placed in charge and 

 commanded to dress and keep it. We are not told how long our first parents were 

 left in possession of this beautiful garden with all its wondrous fruits and enchant- 

 ing flora. But we are told that after the fall they were driven out and the tree of 

 life ever after guarded with a flaming sword lest man should return and eat of its 

 fruit and live forever. 



Ever since the fall it has been a constant struggle for the human race to pre- 

 serve and improve the grain, fruit and vegetables upon which we subsist. True, 

 in tropical countries there are many vegetable and fruit productions in a state of 

 nature suitable for human food, and others that with little care yield incredible 

 quantities of food, among which we find the bannana turning ofi" forty to sixty 

 tons of ripe, luscious, healthy, life-sustaining fruit from a single acre. Yet 

 strange but true it is that in all those highly favored countries, so richly endowed 

 by the gifts of nature, where it would seem the horticulturist would have nothing 

 to do but stretch out his hand and pluck the golden fruit, we find the very lowest 

 and most worthless strata of the human race; while in temperate regions of the 

 globe, where it requires the greatest thought, ingenuity and eflbrt of man to 

 produce his daily food, where the horticulturist must ever be on the alert and up 

 early and late to combat and overcome the adverse conditions of nature, our race 

 has made the most wonderful development, and reached the highest point yet 

 attained in all that is great, good and noble. Here we find our fruits and veget- 

 ables as well as men and women of high culture. 



In the early history of our race, while men were nomadic and wandered from 

 place to place, but little attention was paid to agriculture and much less to horti- 

 culture, and in fact under such conditions, we would scarcely expect either to be 

 found in a flourishing condition any more than they are now found among the 

 untutored tribes of Africa, or the wandering tribes of our own North American 

 Indians. 



But whenever and wherever advancing civilization has taken possession of the 

 earth by a more permanent tenure, man has been obliged to improve the art of 

 horticulture in order to keep pace with the increased number of consumers. High 

 civilization demands high and scientific culture of soil, and the most improved 

 methods of food production to feed the teeming millions of the world's rapidly 

 increasing population. Fortunate for us, and mankind in general, that it is within 

 the scope of horticultural research and labor to increase the yield, improve the 

 quality and produce new varieties ; the result of our labor in this art stands next 

 to creation itself. There seems to be absolutely no limit to improvement and new 

 achievements. And for a field in which to operate there, is no place of equal size 

 on the face of the earth better adapted to the highest perfection of horticulture 

 than this magnificent State of Missouri, centrally located, in the sisterhood of the 

 great commonwealth, that form the strongest and most brilliant galaxy of United 

 States that the world has ever beheld— containing as it does the most wonderful 

 combination of soil, climate, mineral, fruits, vegetables, flowers, birds, animals, 



