38 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1900. 



which marks off one family of plants from another, we come to 

 a gulf that seems to be impassable — beyond it we cannot go. 



I honor Darwin for the work he did and also Grant Allen 

 who recently passed away, and I like to read their books, though 

 their ideas seem to me peculiar. They endow a few of the 

 flowers with a certain measure of intelligence and they say that 

 the white flower was inconspicuous and wanted to attract the 

 notice of the passing insect at night and so it developed a frag- 

 rance, that when the moths flew past in the darkness they would 

 know where to find it, attracted by the sense of smell, and that 

 all the changes and alteration are wrought out by the will of the 

 flower. I own I do not understand it. Even men, endowed 

 with intelligence, men having great resources of intelligence at 

 their command — they cannot alter their stature one inch, try 

 how they will ; they cannot change the limits of their own situa- 

 tion, although they have nearly all the power of the world at 

 the service of their hands. And so, from my flowers I have 

 learned this : there are certain things we can do in the develop- 

 ment of beauty, in the unfolding of the possibilities of a flower, 

 in giving the right to exist to the various charms which the 

 flowers possess and keep hidden in the state of nature ; but be- 

 yond that we cannot go, for there is no creative skill in man ; 

 there is no faculty by which he can call anything into being. 

 That is held in the might of God. 



As I have walked through my garden, I have thought in my 

 own mind that the hand which painted the rainbow and hung the 

 starry lamps in the black dome of night, gave to the rose its 

 splendor and the lily its brightness, that each might bear 

 witness to the world of His mercy and power. 



Now, we get some wonderful visions of the glorious possibili- 

 ties of future change in the flower-garden, better perhaps than 

 we can find them anywhere else. Mr. Farquhar told me a little 

 while ago that if I wanted some good pansy seed I could have 

 some that he paid $70.00 an ounce for — Bugnot's of Paris — 

 not fertilized seed nor of green-house growth ; and my thought 

 went back to the original pansy. 



I suppose you all know how it came into being. It is one of 



