8o state; pomological society. 



is more difficult. Here scientists make use of the principle before 

 stated and call the one a plant and the other an animal according 

 as it can or cannot feed upon inorganic food. 



Having seen the necessity of a knowledge of plants and how 

 to care for them even to our daily bread, let us come to the sub- 

 ject of pleasure from plant study. No real distinction can be 

 made between pleasure and profit. As in the well-known defence 

 of Bunker Hill Monument, "I would like to have the idea of 

 good, explained and analyzed and run out to its elements" and 

 then it would be easy to demonstrate that whatever ministers to 

 pure and innocent pleasure is of real value. As Emerson says 

 in his poem on one of our common flowers, the rhodora, "Beauty 

 is its own excuse for being." Pleasure is one of the utilities of 

 life as real as any other. Whoever would keep sane and sound 

 and not grow morbid and misanthropic, must have varied forms 

 of pleasure and enjoyment. The duller and more plodding the 

 daily work the greater the necessity for change and recreation. 



The largest part of our life has relation to pleasure. 



Business depends upon this element. The greater portion of 

 the business of the world ministers to taste, to enjoyment, to the 

 sense of beauty, to pleasure rather than to mere utility. If we 

 are going to rule out all pleasure why not wrap ourselves in the 

 blanket of the Indian or in the coarsest, rudest material for 

 clothing instead of in the beautiful forms and colors with which 

 civilized men and women adorn themselves ? The world is made 

 beautiful for our enjoyment and for our profit. We are false 

 to our high privileges, we are going contrary to the evident pur- 

 pose of creation, if we do not open our eyes to behold the beauty 

 and our minds to understand something of the mystery with 

 which the Creator has everywhere surrounded us. The sky over 

 our heads is beautiful. Look upon such an evening as this and 

 see in the western sky the new moon as a crescent holding the old 

 moon in its arms ; in the southwest see Orion, the most beautiful 

 of our winter constellations, still shining brightly; overhead a 

 little to the east of the zenith is the sickle of Leo with Mars the 

 reddest of the planets still beautiful; and in the northern sky 

 shines the Pole Star marking almost the exact north, with Cas- 

 siopeia a little removed, and the Great and Little Dippers like 

 "the two hands of the clock in the sky" as Prof. Proctor calls 

 them, turning constantly around the pole, but in our latitude 



