Massachusetts Horikultural Society. 387 



day, with their wealth and luxuriance at the present time. Sir, there 

 are not less than one hundred thousand children in this Coinmon- 

 wealtli under ten years of age, who would go half crazy at the beau- 

 ty, the frairrance, and the deliciousiiess of the treasures you have 

 brouiiht together here. Just think of a company of fifty thousand lit- 

 tle girls, and as many little boys, peeping between pickets, through 

 cracks and key-holes, at such a sight; and longing to make bouquets 

 from your flowers for their own bosoms, and to test the quality of 

 your peaches and plums and grapes, by some swer sense than that of 

 the eye. Now, sir, as your imjirovements increase the temptations 

 of children to take what is not their own, — ought not something, — 

 nay, ought not a great deal to be done, to improve their conscientious- 

 ness, that they may resist those temptations? We are told that in 

 some places in Prussia, the children are trained up in such habits of 

 honesty, that gooseberries, and plums, and cherries, and other fruits, 

 may hang in luscious clusters within their reach the whole season, 

 and ripen by the side-walks, within reach of every child, and yet nev- 

 er be touched by a purloining hand. Have we not a vast work to 

 do, in this country, before we arrive at such a point of juvenile mo- 

 rality .'' Ought not your friends, then, and my friends, to make a com- 

 pact, that while we applaud and patronize your efforts to improve the 

 fruits and flowers of the earth, you shall aid us in renovating the 

 moral character of the young, in improving the celestial fruits — the 

 immortal amaranths of the youthful soul .'' I never pass by your gar- 

 dens and orchards, and see those bristling pickets, — those high fences 

 surmounted with iron spikes, without thinking how much better and 

 safer it would be to have the security which honesty and conscience 

 would give, rather than those uncertain barriers against plunder. 

 This, I am persuaded, we shall have, when we devote an attention to 

 the well-being of the soul, at all corresponding to that which we are 

 accustomed to pay to the well-being of the body. 



"Sir, your present exhibition has been the occasion of enforcing a 

 great truth on my mind, and I thank you for it. We have been told 

 here, to-night, that it is but forty years since the first Horticultural 

 Society in the world — that of London — was established; and all those 

 who are best acquainted with the subject, seem to want words to de- 

 scribe the extent of the improvements since effected in this beautiful 

 art. What does this prove but nature's susceptibility of amelioration 

 under the cultivating hand of man .'' The whole vegetable world is 

 one varied manifestation of this animating, encouraging truth. Un- 

 der human culture, wild and bitter roots become wholesome and de- 

 licious esculents. Fruits, before acid and dwarfish, bend their branch- 

 es with golden and nectarious clusters; and flowering trees, before 

 stinted and feeble, put on an ampler and more diversified coronal of 

 beauty. 



"The same thing is true in regard to animals. The faithful and sa- 

 gacious dog is only the great-grandson, or some later descendant, of 

 the wolf; and the noble horse and ox have acquired their fleetness 

 and draft under the improving, though so often ungenerous, hand of 

 man. Are these capabilities, think you, confined to the inanimate 

 world — or to the lower orders of animals? No; the same capacities 

 abound through all the domains of nature. We see it in our own 



