160 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1898. 



I would suggest that we introduce horticulture and agriculture 

 into the public school. I think my friends who criticized our 

 course of study will say that it is only another thing to burden 

 the children, to bear them down and overwork them ; but I am 

 glad that it comes from Boston, everything that comes from 

 Boston is all right, so there must be a good reason for saying 

 that we want a little more nature study in the public school. I 

 think we are safe, Mr. President, in the suggestion, and I hope 

 that it will be followed up. I hope that in every school^'ard in 

 Worcester there will l)e some green thing growing, a few tish 

 swimming, something to suggest to the children the life that is 

 so abundant and so beautiful in the boundaries of the city which 

 some hardly ever reach. 



There are sixteen suburban schools about this city. I visited 

 one of them, beautiful in architecture, beautiful in situation, 

 beautiful in its surroundings, and one of the teachers who had 

 reason to know what she was talking about said that her father 

 had promised to put everything into their yard that she asked 

 him to. And she said : "We are going to have the grounds 

 fixed up and we want you to come down later in the season and 

 see them." The Bloomingdale is all trimmed up and fixed in 

 the latest style, on horticultural principles. This is an interest- 

 ing topic to me. It comes very near to me. I feel that these 

 children are robbed of something in not having what we sug- 

 gested for them. A student of one of our public institutions 

 said to me the other day : " We are missing it in not putting 

 into our country-schools something of horticulture. These 

 children are farmers, all of them. We have our agricultural 

 colleges, but they are rapidly becoming like other colleges." I 

 hope this is not true of Amherst nor, indeed, of any other agri- 

 cultural college. In a little town in New Hampshire I found 

 that there had been forty-eight deaths and sixteen births, and 

 that is about what has been going on in all the country towns. 

 There are very few children left now. Of over forty children 

 who attended school where I first taught, they are all gone but 

 two I Is there anything our society can do to make them con- 

 tented to remain in the country? Cannot we devise anything 



