28 State Horticultural Society. 



The first man was a horticulturist. His home was in a garden of 

 delight, a paradise of loveliness and beauty. Within that sacred con- 

 servatory he could survey the most rare and beautiful productions in 

 the whole vegetable world. Along the shaded walks and winding 

 streams were fruitful trees and climbing vines. Flowers of the sweet- 

 est perfume shed fragrance on his path. The towering cedar crowned 

 the distant heights and the tufted palm waved its feathery fronds in 

 the evening wind. In such a home, surrounded with beauty and 

 loaded with blessing, man was placed with the injunction "to dress 

 and keep it." Had the matter been left to him, he might have chosen 

 to be placed in an automatic garden that would dress and keep itself, 

 where he might sit under the trees listening to the mournful winds, 

 to singing birds and murmuring brooks, watching the panorama of 

 clouds sweeping by, saying sweet nothings to Eve, and building castles 

 in the air. But his Creator knew that under such conditions the man 

 would run to adipose tissue and fail to develop the possibilities that 

 were in him. The man who will not work is out of harmony with 

 nature. The world is a vast laboratory, air, earth and water being 

 ever busy in the work of decomposition and reconstruction. Listen, 

 and you may hear the "hum of mighty workings," wheels revolving 

 and dynamos singing. Force is being turnel out in various forms 

 and applied to its manifold uses. Bees are making honey, birds are 

 building nests, beasts of burden are plodding along the beaten path. 

 The indolent man is a loose pin in the machine, and the order of nature 

 would be better off without him. The great sociological problem is 

 how to deal with the nonproducers, those who violate no law but the 

 primal law of industry. The multitudinous army of tramps, the sum 

 total of whose philosophy is, "The world owes me a living ;" and the 

 still more difficult class of the idle aristocracy, to many of whom a 

 patrimony has proven a curse by robbing them of any serious motive 

 in life, are a standing menace to our civilization. Hence, the Creator 

 in divine wisdom ordained that man should work, and dignified and 

 blessed the first of the race by making him a horticulturist. Placed 

 close to great nature's heart, it was his privilege to feel the divine pul- 

 sations and to hear the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden 

 in the cool of the day. Blind, deaf and insensate is he whose soul is 

 not deeply moved in this close contact with nature. 



To him who iu the love of nature holds 

 Oommunlon with her visible forms, 

 She speaks a various language. 



Society is kept sane and sweet by the men whose privilege it is to 

 live and labor in God's beautiful out-doors. How hard a lot it must 



