42, JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
great feelings of pleasure that I undertook the responsibility. I thought, 
“What can I say about horticulture?’ If I deal with it in its 
modern aspects I shall not know where to begin, what to say, or how to 
end. J thought, if I speak on the horticulture of past days, there is little 
or nothing left to be said. If we ask, what did the ancients know about 
horticulture—had they any ideas about horticulture as we have ? we find 
a great gap, an absolute silence. All we can find about their gardens is 
that they were “herb” gardens. We have all heard of a certain king 
who robbed a man of his estate and turned it into a garden of herbs. 
We have all heard about the paradise of the Greeks, that consisted of 
trees, walks, and so forth. But when we turn to see what they did in 
the cultivation of flowers, it is extraordinary that history is perfectly 
silent. The great writersof the early centuries of this era, or a little 
before it, scarcely spoke of gardens at all. I think probably twenty-five 
varieties of plants would cover everything in their gardens; but then in 
their regions wild flowers were so abundant and beautiful that there 
was no necessity to grow flowers in their gardens. I remember Seneca, 
in denouncing the luxurious habits of the Roman nobles of his 
time, speaks of the extravagance of making dishes of larks’ 
tongues, and adds that they literally stripped the fields of their 
flowers to adorn their feasts. Ovid speaks of a Rose garden, 
but I doubt whether this was more than a few wild Roses. When 
we come to the dark ages of the fifteenth century—(we hear of 
nothing before, except a few Lettuces and such things, though, that 
reminds me, the Romans were proud of their gardens, and some of the 
great families named themselves after Beans and Lettuces)—coming down 
to the middle ages, there is nothing tobe said. In the sixteenth century, 
flowers at last began to be cultivated. But if we look at our own 
country, we do not find much in the way of flowers until the eighteenth 
century, and it isin the nineteenth century we get them coming in witha 
rush. The Chrysanthemums came dribbling in between the tens, twenties, 
and thirties of this century, and with a great rush in 1842. The 
Calceolarias also came in during this time. And then a few gardeners 
began to cross plants, which is the subject which brings us here to-night. 
The idea of crossing hitherto was unknown. The ancients were quite 
aware of it so far as the Palm was concerned. I mean the Date Palm; and 
we suppose that they artificially fertilised the Fig; but they knew nothing 
about the sexes of plants; they knew that if an enemy was in the country 
the first thing to be done was to cut down the male trees, so as to ruin the 
crop of Dates without having to destroy the Date-bearing trees. It is 
attributed to Sir Thomas Midleton that he first suggested that the pollen 
and stigma should be united to make seed. Linneus took it up as you 
know ; but it was not until Knight, the President of the Royal Horti- 
cultural Society, and Dean Herbert took up the subject of crossing that 
we entered on an entirely new field that transcends to-day everything 
else in the realm of horticulture. I have travelled as quickly as I could 
over that vast subject of. ‘ Horticulture’? which has been entrusted to 
me, and I will only ask you to drink continued success to it, coupled with 
the names of those eminent exponents of it—Mr. Herbert J. Webber, of 
the Department of Agriculture and Horticulture-of the United States of 
