Vermont State Horticultural Socikty. 45 



by means of breeding new varieties. We ar;e not breeding corn 

 now so much to get a new variety to which we may give a new 

 name, as to get a variety of corn that will contain the largest 

 amount of starch or protein or oil 



I am merely going over these matters hurriedly and will 

 leave them with you to impress upon your mind that horti- 

 culture has grown and has become a profession in itself. 



At the convention in Western New York the exhibition of 

 spraying machinery and other apparatus was so great that if 

 a man who had been present 50 years before had dropped in and 

 not knowing the progress made in the way of tools, he would 

 have known scarcely any of those implements or what they were 

 for. 



Commercial practices have arisen within the 50 years. We 

 have progressed from the wagon and the canal to the days of 

 fast freight and express. We have seen the evolution of trans- 

 portation of fruits and flowers and vegetables ; we have seen 

 the opening of foreign markets to our fruits ; have seen the 

 evolution of the cold storage ; we have seen the special kinds 

 of manufacture ; the special products of wine and cider. 



The canning factories have come; we have seen in the last 

 50 years the evolution of special schools for agriculture. And let 

 me say to you right here, how glad I am that you are to have Mor- 

 rill Hall; all honor to the man who set on foot an enterprise for 

 the endowment of educational institutions the Uke of which have 

 never been known in the world. And the great schools of the 

 future ; all these will have to do with the lives of men and be 

 for the betterment of men. All schools and experiment stations 

 have come in the last 50 years. These colleges had a long period 

 of incubation; they did not make much progress at first; it 

 was a difficult subject to promote, to bring agriculture into peda- 

 gogical form ; it needed leaders ; it has now become concrete, 

 and you will see more ostensible progress in the next 10 years 

 than you have seen in the last 50 years, because the work is 

 now well in hand. We have seen the evolution of books on 

 horticulture; we have seen the rise of the farmers' institute 

 movement; we can trace it back at least to 1842, but it never 

 became a definite, concrete movement until 20 or 25 years ago. 

 The department of agriculture at Washington has come within 

 recent years. The number of men who are employed in that 

 department along these various lines of horticulture is very 

 large. 



Are there opportunities in horticulture? Yes, if you make 

 them. I never yet saw an opportunity chase a man. Oppor- 

 tunities are very largely what you make them, but there are 

 conditions that allow a man to make them and seize them. 



