102 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1898. 



in the peach, is put about that single seed to save its life. The 

 raspberry, differing from the strawberry, has its seed inside of 

 each luscious globe of fruit, and this fruit can be pulled off the 

 stem, while the blackberry, you notice, has its seeds covered in 

 the same way but its fruit is fastened to the stem. 



The progress of the rose family is a recent matter, just as the 

 fruit-eating birds are recent. The primitive birds were carniv- 

 erous altogether. The later more graceful and attractive ones 

 are fruit-eating, and practically they all came in together with 

 the Tertiary epoch. We find their earliest remains in earth 

 so recent that as yet it has not hardened into rock or stone. 

 May I not fairly say here of this rose family that in it we have 

 one of the noblest families from our point of view in the whole 

 vegetable world. It is a family that has grown up together 

 with man, and it has given him some of his best friends, good 

 friends to cheer the sight of his eyes and delight his sense of 

 smell and to satisfy his hunger. It has raised him up the apple, 

 pear, plum, peach, almond, blackberry, strawberry, raspberry, 

 and dewberry, — and I dare say I have left out some. Think 

 of the leafy shade, of the radiant bloom, of the sweet scenting 

 of the air, and the luscious fruit these different sisters of the 

 one family have produced for him. And all from some primi- 

 tive, colorless, scentless, flavorless rose that probably we would 

 not recognize to be a rose at all. 



But, then, if we are to think of the foliage and the flowers 

 and the fruit we also have got to think of the thorn and the 

 briar. The hawthorn and the crab-apple with their angry teeth, 

 and the blackberry and the rose with their spiteful thorns. 

 Well, how did such things come? There is a problem that I 

 want you to meet with me this afternoon. We have one of 

 men's earliest ideas of how thorns and prickles came, preserved 

 to us in the venerable old book of the Bible, the book of 

 Genesis. It is that they came as the curse of God on man for 

 Adam's disobedience. " Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in 

 sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns 

 also and thistles shall it bear unto thee." Well, when men 

 imagined such an origin for the thorns as that they had not yet 



