Chester County Horticultural Society. 543 



Penn. Within these walls, now decorated by fair hands for this autumnal 

 festival, for half a life-time he took an earnest, anxious part in the questions 

 connected with the settlement of the estates where you plant your gardens 

 and cultivate your grounds. Here he has toiled, as some present can bear 

 him good witness, for days and weeks, to demonstrate, that a decayed relic 

 of one of the ancient monarchs of Penn's woods, " to wit," a certain black- 

 oak stump, should determine all questions about a boundary line of one of 

 the estates "aforesaid." But this ancient Hall of Justice, identical with 

 the history, transmission, and partition of every estate in this county for 

 the last sixty years, and with the present title to each particular spot where 

 these flowers and fruits were grown, is soon to pass away. It was well to 

 decorate it thus before the final sacrifice. Already its elegant and classic 

 neighbor seems impatient of its humbler presence, whose interesting mem- 

 ories it cannot supply. 



In reviewing the history of this time-honored Hall, how are we reminded 

 of the contrast between those warlike demonstrations from ancient Upland, 

 ■which threatened, with artillery, to batter down these rising walls, and the 

 peaceful decorations, redolent of beauty and harmony, which grace its exit. 

 These flowers and fruits, methinks, are kindly tokens which mother earth 

 sends up to bid the Old Court House good bye. 



As Chester County led the van in the settlement and culture of Penn's 

 woods, so should it still be the banner county in agriculture and horticulture. 

 It possesses the elements for this distinction in the virtue, industry, intelli- 

 gence, and thrift of its population, and in the fertility of its soil, its genial 

 climate, its varied surface, its beautiful streams, its abounding springs, its 

 rich, indigenous Flora — and in the good fortune to have produced a son, the 

 pride and pleasure of whose life it is, to develop the history, character, and 

 properties, the beauties and the uses, of the vegetable world. Permit me 

 to add to these commanding advantages, your vicinity to and daily improving 

 facilities of intercourse with our great metropolis, justly famed for its devo- 

 tion to science, and particularly to the study of the Natural Sciences. Her 

 schools and her collections in these departments are scarcely rivalled on this 

 continent, and they are all within your reach. You have already set an 

 example worthy of imitation by every other county in the state, in your own 

 Collections of Natural History. They evince a taste and spirit worthy of 

 all commendation. 



As Pennsylvania was the first to establish an Agricultural Society, so she 

 was the first state of this Union to establish a Horticultural Society : still 

 earlier, she had made an attempt at a Botanic Garden. It is now near an 

 hundred years since Bartram began his enterprise on the Schuylkill, and its 

 glory has not yet departed. You have still the evidence before you of what 

 Humphry Marshall attempted, soon after, in this •vicinity. 



Botany, an essential element of Horticulture, has still higher claims upon 

 you : the first cultivators of the ancient County of Chester were country- 

 men of the immortal Linnseus, the great discoverer of that secret whereby 

 the whole vegetable kingdom was first reduced to system through all its 

 varieties, from the trees of the forest to the moss. 



