GARDEN LESSONS 287 



fringe, for one more commonplace. I learn from flowers 

 the perfect usefulness of every part of creation. I do 

 not mean the usefulness to man only, measured by 

 what it can buy him in comforts or in pounds, shillings, 

 and pence, but I mean that every created thing has its 

 own allotted place in the world, and fills the particular 

 place which it fills better than anything else could. 

 People who are not gardeners look on botany as an 

 abstract science of no great practical use, but even in 

 the matter of commercial utility the results are really 

 very striking. In Mr. Jackson's Commercial Botany of 

 the Nineteenth Century, recently published, there is a 

 long and most interesting list of plants of different 

 sorts that have been introduced into commerce during 

 the present century, and of nearly all of them there is 

 the record of most material assistance given by the 

 scientific staff at Kew. But this is not all; plants 

 which apparently are of no use to man, and plants 

 which are even hurtful to man, have yet their uses in 

 the economy of nature ; and it is no proof to the con- 

 trary that we have not yet been able to find them out. 

 We have only to think of the hundreds of thousands of 

 square miles on the globe's surface where man never 

 comes, but which are covered with the full vegetation 

 suitable to each part, and we soon realise that plants 

 must have their uses though no man sees them. On 



