THE BANQUET. 45 
privilege to associate with hybridists from many parts of the world, I 
have come to believe there is no more law-abiding body to be found than 
the hybridists assembled here to-night. Their business is to find out 
what the law which governs hybridism and kindred phenomena is, and 
they are determined to do it. It is with the law that governs natural 
things as it is with the law of the land, you never know what it is until 
you get at the point of breaking it, if I may say so in the presence of 
one of Her Majesty’s most eminent Judges. You must go on until you 
break the law, and then, at last, you know its limitations. The man 
who invented the metric system and incubators—the Chinese invented 
incubators, of course; but I mean the man who invented incu- 
bators we could use—in his interesting book, said one of the projects 
he set himself to carry out was to hybridise a rabbit and a fowl. But 
there, as Professor Henslow would say, his experiments in hybridisation 
failed. He found he had reached the confines of law. But without 
going so far as that there are many, many laws which we are perfectly 
certain we can find out, and which, if found out, would produce a most 
effective development in science and practice. It is the motto of our 
sister society, the Royal Agricultural Society, “Science with practice ”’ ; 
and a great deal has been said of the possibilities before us if we adopt 
this motto too. I believe the Agricultural society, in saying ‘science 
with practice,’ meant to imply that practice is to gain by its asso- 
ciation with science. I am afraid that in hybridising all the gain is 
going to be on the side of science. If we could fully ally science 
with practice in horticulture, it seems to me that the gain would be 
all to science, for on the subject of hybridisation scientific people 
have little or nothing to tell us as yet. There was once a society that 
existed for the purpose of mending the clothes of the poor—darning 
and sewing on buttons, and so forth. Once an Irishman, of whom you 
may have heard, came to that society with a button in his hand and said, 
“Tf you would be so good as to sew a shirt to this button, I should be 
very much obliged.” That is like science and practice in horticultural 
hybridisation. Science produces the button and practice has to bring 
the shirt. But by-and-by that will be all adjusted. Everybody knows 
how things began with electricity, chemistry, and so forth, and so it will 
be in horticulture and hybridisation. When I think of those who are to 
respond to this toast, Mr. Swingle, who is associated with that extra- 
ordinary development the Bureau of Agriculture in America, which has 
experiment stations all over that vast continent; when I think of the 
opportunities which they have which we in England have not, for in 
England, apart from private enterprise, there is nothing of the sort going 
on; when we think of all this, of the time that must elapse before equip- 
ment for scientific research can be set up, and any valuable results be 
gained, it is essential that some permanent record be made. As one sees 
sometimes in legal documents, “ Time is of the essence of the contract.’’ 
Without having the guarantee that these experiments will be carried 
on beyond our lifetime, many people think it is not worth while to begin 
them. We need a permanent home, so that the work that has been 
done will not be swept away into oblivion when we ourselves happen 
to go. Surely sooner or later someone will come forward and offer 
