WINTER MEETING AT LEBANON. 195 



As will be readily seen, this topic is a broad one, being applicable 

 to all the departments of animate and inanimate nature ; but here we 

 shall consider only what utility plus beauty may have to do with horti- 

 culture. 



The useful lias been defined as "that which makes man's life more 

 easy or more agreeable." Nature herself supplies us with very few 

 useful things. Excepting the earth, which sustains us, the air which 

 we breathe, and the water which we drink, what else is due solely to 

 her"? All that we own or possess is due to the conquest of labor. 

 Man has the power of selecting, working o^er, adapting and assimilat- 

 ing various objects in nature, so that, though he has no power of orig- 

 inating, by developing the resources at his hand, he puts the stamp of 

 usefulness uyon many objects that were before of no value, or even 

 dangerous to his fellow- creatures. But all this is done only at the 

 expense of much time and almost infinite patience. 



An unthinking person is apt to regard a beautiful collection of 

 fruits and vegetables as marvels of nature's handiwork, but they are 

 not so. They are the marvels of human industry. Let him look at the 

 superb apples and pears that we raise in Southwest Missouri, and then 

 remember that, originally in Asia, they were small, dry and worthless 

 pomes ; at our magnificent peaches that first existed as coarse and in- 

 significant fruits, and at the mammoth potato that was, many years ago, 

 only the very small tuber of a South American plant — let him look at 

 these, and he will see that it is from the apparently worthless and some- 

 times even noxious gifts of nature that, by careful selection and culti- 

 vation, all that is most useful to us, and beautiful, has been produced. 

 Even the staple of our food was, in its original state, a minute seed, 

 growing spontaneously in Egypt, unfit for bread. Note to what a high 

 state of cultivation man has, to-day, brought the one item of wheat. 



But utility alone does not satisfy the human mind. There are 

 instincts within us which demand that beauty of form and color shall be 

 a valued accompaniment of beauty of adaptation. Man's efforts for 

 man must be viewed in their esthetic as well as their practical aspect. 

 The beautiful is closely connected with the useful. They act and react 

 upon each other, and, in their mutual relations, are capable of almost 

 unlimited development. We must all agree with Mr. Gladstone, who 

 says that "the sense of beauty is not, under natural and equal circum- 

 stances, the inheritance of a few, but is meant to be, should be and may 

 be the universal inheritance of mankind." The cultivation of this much 

 neglected sense should have a place in the earliest scheme for the train- 

 ing of the childish mind; instead of the hideous objects which are so 



/ 



