448 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



wards she was taken sick. It would not do in those days, any more than 

 in these, for a doctor to say he didn't know, so it was concluded that those 

 grapes must have had the plague about them. It was charged that, 

 knowingly having the great plague in his house, yet Grindall sent Her 

 Majesty grapes. It was fortunate that the connoisseur sent to examine 

 the affair found the bishop's family in a usual state of health, or the ac- 

 cused might have lost his head. 



Not long since there was some typhoid fever in a district near Phil- 

 adelphia. ''The physicians" — they always put in this ambiguous plural — 

 said it "must be" from drinking Schuylkill water-the great river that sup- 

 plies the huge city with drink. Then it broke out in a district 400 feet 

 above tide-water, and where the water was from a large and particularly 

 healthful crystal spring, As it would not do to charge it to water here, 

 the trees caught it. "The physicians" declared there were too many of 

 them, and a large number of beautiful specimens, some of them of great 

 value and variety, fell before the ax or were ruined. 



Not fifty miles from Philadelphia, perhaps nearer New York than 

 that city, an unusually intelligent florist undertook to get up a trade in 

 aquatic plants. Some billious trouble appeared in the house, and 'the 

 physicians" attributed it to the water tanks of the poor florist, and he has 

 been literally ordered to leave the place. 



I know a church entirely covered with beautiful vines. It was the 

 pride of the district. Some one, who had seen the sun dry a pile of clay, 

 started the whim that the shade of the leaves kept the sun from the walls, 

 and that the dampness was unhealthful. "The physicians" joined in the 

 cry; the beautiful vines were cut away. It was no use tor those who 

 had practical experience to say that vines kept the walls dry, — for the 

 intelligent horticulturist to point to the innumerable rootlets sucking 

 from the walls every particle of moisture, for the antiquarian to tell ot 

 ivy-clothed ruins of the old world — ruins still remaining because the 

 ivy-dried walls defied the pick of the iconoclost to reduce them. " The 

 physicians " had said. The vines had to go. 



Just now the great bugaboo is Bacterium, Bacillus, Micrococcus, and 

 an innumerable string of hard words are slung at us by "the physicians," 

 and to read what they write for us makes it a wonder that any human 

 life is left on our planet; but there are bacteria in dew drops, and more 

 of these terrible creatures in the teeth-tartar of everybody's mouth than 

 in all the water they drink in a whole life time. 



Flowers are banished from our living rooms. "The physicians" say 

 they are unhealthful; especially at night, but the poor consumptive, 

 given up to die, takes his tent and camp utensils, sleeps out on the fresh 



