78 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



department have learned to have a much higher regard for your knowl- 

 edge of the great art of growing fine fruits, while on the other hand I 

 trust that you have learned that the science of botany contains much 

 knov/ledge that has proved useful to you in your work. But more than 

 this professional regard is the mutual friendship that has sprung up 

 between us. We who are making scientific study of plants have learned 

 to regard you who study plants for practical ends as our close personal 

 friends. We look forward with pleasure each year to your coming, and 

 welcome you to these rooms. We gladly turn them over to you, feeling 

 that they will still be used for the promotion of a knowledge of plants, 

 for after all. Horticulture is only one of the practical applications of 

 botany, and so in a sense you are all botanists. 



And in a certain sense, botanists are in turn becoming horticulturists. 

 The time was, when a botanist was a man who wandered alone over the 

 fields or through the woods, looking for new and unfamiliar wild plants, 

 which he dried and then labeled, and put away in his herbarium. Today, 

 while we still love this work of botanizing, we grow plants and 

 watch them even more closely than you do. Go out into the University 

 Plant House, and see the hundreds of seedlings that the young botanists 

 are growing in order to learn something as to their manner of living, 

 their relations to the richness and the moisture of the soil, to the humid- 

 ity of the air, and the kind, amount, and intensity of the light. We have 

 to know much of the gardener's art in order that we may compel plants 

 to grow as we wish them. The essential difference is, that you grow 

 plants for their use or beauty, while we grow them in order that we may 

 become more intimately acquainted with them. You consider the finished 

 product, be it fine fruit or beautiful flower, while we try to find out what 

 is their structure, and how they came into being. Both of us are working 

 In the great field of botany, but in different parts of it. You are working 

 on one side, while we are at work on the other. Sometimes each party has 

 ignored the other, and forgotten that after all both are in the same 

 great field of human activity. In some places in this country, there is 

 no sympathy between the two parties, to their great mutual loss. 

 The horticulturists need the science which the botanists can bring, and 

 the botanists need the practical ability and experience which the horti- 

 culturists possess. 



Gentlemen of the Horticultural Society, I welcome you to the Univer- 

 sity, and I welcome you especially to these rooms of the Botanical 

 Department. May your papers, discussions and deliberations result in 

 great profit to yourselves, and in still greater profit to this good state of 

 ours, — the state with rich soil and good water, — ^with pure air and clear 

 skies, — which grows great crops of com and wheat, — on whose prairies 

 and hills there roam millions of fattening cattle and swine, — and whose 

 orchards bend under the weight of their red- and golden-colored fruits. 



Again I bid you a hearty welcome. [Applause.] 



