34^ State Horticultural Society. 



In all its stages from the placing of the plant or tree in the ground 

 till the ripened fruit is gathered does it give pleasure. A man of the 

 right sort, and by the right sort I mean one who from earliest childhood 

 has worked with fruit in a small or a large \\ay, much prefers to grow 

 his own fruit rather than to have some one grow it for him. To cultivate 

 even a small strawberry bed will make one forget all about business wor- 

 ries, and by the pleasure it gives may save one from a nervous break- 

 down or from the insane asylum. - 



Fruit growing therefore gives both pleasure and profit. From these 

 two considerations alone the tax-payer might ask that his child should 

 have at least some elementary instructions in Horticulture. 



The objection urged by teachers is that our public school course is 

 already overburdened. There is some truth in this, yet it is possible that 

 we are teaching many things which are not of the slightest use to the 

 child. \\'e compel him to study Greek myths, fairy tales and so-called 

 language lessons and literature. Yet we fail utterly to give him a knowl- 

 edge of the English sentence. We worry him over Julius Caesar, while 

 he is unable to spell very conmion words. He is asked to figure out 

 Coleridge's philosophy of life from reading the "Ancient Alariner," when 

 it is doubtfid whether the poet himself could have answered that ques- 

 tion. 



Teachers force the child to study the star-fish, sea-urchin and other 

 marine forms and shut him off from everything pertaining to his sur- 

 roundings. Thoughtless pedagoues seem to think they are doing the 

 right thing when they set immature students to dissecting animals, sec- 

 tioning plants and using the compound microscope. Such work, ac- 

 cording to some of the best teachers in the United States, should not be 

 attempted even in the high school. We are trying to make specialists 

 of pupils before they become generalists. L. H. Bailey says, "The micro- 

 scope is not an introduction to the study of nature." The same writer 

 says, "Teach first the things nearest to hand. When the pupil has seen 

 the common he ma>- be introduced to the rare and the distant. We live in 

 the midst of common things." If we drop out the useless things we 

 shall have plenty of time to study the useful. Pupils will certainly get 

 much more pleasure and profit in studying an apple tree or a strawberry 

 plant than in the dissection of a sea-urchin or of a cat. Prof. C. A. 

 Whitman, Director of the Marine Biological Station at Wood's Holl, 

 ^Massachusetts, says in substance, that we have reached the limit of the 

 laboratory. What we need now is the biology of the farm. 



Another objection urged against Agriculture and fruit growing is 

 that it carries with it no culture. Only languages and literature, ac- 



