424 State Board of Aoriculture, &c. 



wliich man bestows any attention whatever, but will be 

 made to feel its potent influence. Fruits and vegetables, 

 flowering and foliage plants, cereals and grasses, herbs, 

 shrubs and trees, — everything, from tlie tiny growth that 

 contents itself with a three inch pot, up to the monarch of 

 the mountain forest, — all these myriad vegetable forms, 

 lying plastic as clay in the hands of the experimenter, shall 

 be made to exhibit manifold variations never before seen, 

 and not as yet conceived of. 



That there are certain limitations imposed upon the work 

 of the hybridist, that there are absolute boundaries appointed 

 to genera, if not to species, beyond which he may not in all 

 time push his modifications of the original type, is not to be 

 denied. But how broad these boundaries are, what may be 

 the utmost limits of variability of each species, how many 

 and what species of any genus may be blended in the per- 

 mutation of endless variations, what genera, even, as they 

 are now received, he may have the boldness to undertake to 

 unite, — all these innumerable questions await solution by the 

 tireless experiments of a long future 



In thus predicting for my art so glorious and beneficent a 

 career, I am not giving expression to some groundless vis- 

 ion, conceived in the imagination of an enthusiast, but I 

 reason from what I have seen as a practical hybridizer, and 

 from the splendid results which have followed the desultory 

 efforts of the few who have entered this field. The advance 

 already made in Europe justifies this belief. The superior- 

 ity of the horticulture of the nations of ISorthern Europe 

 over our own, is not all to be attri'.juted to their older civili- 

 zation, their greater wealth, or the patronage of govern- 



