WINTER MEETING. 269 



attractive to the eye as well as to the understanding. of both pupil and 

 teacher. There can be no book written on all the varied subjects that 

 man must master that can be compared in beauty or usefulness to it. 

 Nature's studies are the child's delightful studies and none approach 

 or combine the beautiful and useful quite so closely as does the study 

 of horticulture. Today this Society is taking the initiatory steps to 

 collect, define, illustrate, classify and arrange for the school-room those 

 facts that every truly educated son and daughter of Missouri must 

 know. 



Our education always has been and always will be sadly neglected 

 without this knowledge. No man should ever be entrusted to map 

 out the future of Missouri without it. Ob, that we might live in the 

 sunshine of true knowledge and plan for the future not dwell in the 

 past. Oh, that our teachers would teach the needs of the age in which 

 we live, instead of turning out boys and girls into the world who know 

 so little of the real life and heart of everything about them. 



Our school-rooms should be in touch with the living present in- 

 stead of lingering in the cemeteries of the dead theories of unscien- 

 tific ages. How very unfit our boys and girls are to possess the fields 

 for horticulture when they leave our schools. How little they know. 

 How failure will strew their pathway with disappointment, wreck and 

 ruin. They will censure, they will heap reproaches upon the State that 

 fails to educate them. They do it because disappointment and despair 

 follow their efforts. I would not say it if I did not know it. If there 

 is any virtue in us who see these conditions, we will lay the founda- 

 tion on solid rock. The rock is education. Our duty is plain. As 

 long as we live let us labor to bring about that freedom which educa- 

 tion alone can give to those into whose hands we will soon entrust the 

 destinies of the grandest State in the Union. 



WHAT HAS BEEN DONE. 



Seven years ago the members of this Society were confronted with 

 the fact that there was no practical common school text-book on horti- 

 culture that the student could study. 



We have undertaken the task of preparing such a book. Our plan 

 is to show conclusively to the people the need of such a study ; to 

 awaken enthusiasm in its favor among ourselves, the teachers and 

 public spirited men, and at the same time to collect such knowledge 

 as is adequate to the needs of the present time. For the last four years 

 we have sent out a new list of 100 questions on horticulture to be 

 answered by those experts who know best the answers. As their in- 

 formation is received it is published in our annual reports, and finally 



