ANNUAL WINTER MEETING. 89 
my grounds, to be given and distributed to the children, gratis, 
with the understanding that they should care for those plants 
and do the best they can to cultivate them. I am induced to 
make this offer for another reason, and that is, that in my own 
state I was invited on last Arbor Day to address the children of 
our high school. During the exercises I made the following 
proposition to them: ‘‘I will give to every child that will come 
to my farm to-morrow morning,either six strawberry plants or 
two raspberry plants, you to take them with the understanding 
that you shall set them out at once and cultivate them and make 
them grow if possible, and learn all you can about them. The 
next season those of you who make them grow will be entitled 
to twice as many. I will double the donation to the successful 
ones.” At that time I supposed that perhaps fifteen or twenty 
would be up there the next morning, but before seven o’clock 
the following morning the children commenced to come, and 
before six o’clock that night over 400 pupils from our public 
schools had been out there and back again—it is over a mile— 
for those plants. 
Well, from that time to this, all through the summer every 
child that I met would have an expression in their eye, and 
they would meet me so often and tell how those plants were 
prospering, and how some of them had died, and others had 
drooped, and how they had watered them—and probably killed 
them with kindness—but the expression upon their faces, was 
wonderfully surprising tome. It suggested to me that if our 
state societies, by some means, could inaugurate a free distri- 
bution of flowers, or evergreens, or a half-dozen strawberry 
plants, or something of that kind, they would be laying the 
foundation for horticultural work in this state that would be of 
immense benefit to you in a few years. I made this same pro- 
position at the meeting of the Northern Iowa Society, and 
the members immediately said ‘‘we will add one thousand to 
that donation. We will give three or five plants, as the case 
may be.” We raised enough there for about 20,000 plants of 
that kind. Now, there is no way of distributing these to good 
advantage except by the organization of your local societies, 
and I would like to see that started and would be most happy 
to contribute half a dozen plants to be distributed in that way 
to each of the first thousand children that can’be induced to 
grow those plants. I have no selfish motive in making this 
offer, because banking is my business, I am connected with our 
State Horticultural Society in Wisconsin for glory, and I am 
