1898.] ANNUAL REUNION. 155 



and bring to your honored president and yourselves the hearty 

 greetings of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and bid 

 you Godspeed in all your efforts for horticultural good. I am 

 glad to come up here and pay my respects to so many who I 

 know personnlly are experts and thorough horticulturists. It 

 is an honor to come to this city which has such diversified 

 interests to my mind, and if any troubles in the business line 

 should come I do not see how it would be possible for them to 

 art'ect Worcester much. She has no one basket of efrgs like 

 some cities ; they are thoroughly scattered, much to her credit. 

 It is a pleasure for me to come here and renew old associa- 

 tions. One early one has been referred to this evening, and it 

 makes me feel that I hope they won't have a new bridge. That 

 may be all wrong, I don't know the local feeling at all. But I 

 will tell you why I say so. When I was a year or two younger 

 than I am now, I used to come up here and cheer the boat- 

 races, and it was one of the times when Harvard used to win 

 and we had four consecutive years of my ruining my voice and 

 Harvard's winning. I was told tonight that usually about 

 twenty-tive youths were shut up in one of your hotels, but I 

 never got in there myself. It must be a very inhospitable 

 place not to take everyone into the hotel. I have the most 

 delightful recollections of that bridge, which existed then and I 

 think it is the same one that is there today, a wooden bridge 

 stretching from pier to pier, if I am not wrong. 



Mr. President, there is a serious side to this, and a practical 

 one which comes up into my mind. And it is one that I had 

 the pleasure of speaking on in another part of Worcester County 

 the other day. I am not an educator, I am not in that line, but 

 I have had the honor of speaking on the subject, and, gentlemen, 

 it has given me much pleasure to do so. It is that I wish that 

 we could have a little more botany, a little more entomology, 

 and a little more natural history in our schools. Not for those 

 things in themselves, but for the powers of observation that 

 come from studying those things, which it seems to me cannot 

 fail to be of great value to everyone. Look at the grand men 

 who came from the homes of New England where they were 



