54 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY [1911-12 



would become smoke and flame and very soon it would be 

 converted into invisible gases. 



Yet the scientists tell us that not one particle of this matter 

 can be really destroyed. Take a burning candle, snuff it out, 

 and very soon the gas has enveloped the entire room. The 

 candle has changed its shape and form, but scientists know no 

 such thing as annihilation. Come up to the realm of humanity, 

 and how is it? 



One day a young man came to my house and pulled the 

 door bell. I had not seen him for many years, and if I had 

 stopped to think about the matter, at that moment, I might 

 have remembered that I had never seen that young man in 

 his present shape. For the physiologist says that every seven 

 years a man wears away his body. The latest figures reduce 

 it to about one year. And I understand that the heart is entirely 

 worn out every sixty days, and so the young man, as I looked 

 upon him several years ago, was not the young man I gazed 

 upon, when he pulled my door bell. It is the part of a man 

 which the scientist has never seen or weighed which endures 

 longest even in this present life. 



You remember when Emerson bought his farm, he said, 

 "I had no realization what a bargain I had made; I realized 

 that I had purchased certain buildings and farm utensils but 

 I did not know what a sunset or sunrise I had purchased every 

 day; I did not remember that I had a host of stars over my head. 

 That land was not only good for its apparent cash value, but 

 that it had a high and more ethereal excellence." And now I 

 am going to close my talk of this afternoon with just one other 

 illustration: Many years ago the noted poet Goethe was 

 entertained at a county villa at Stratsburg with several other 

 people, and on the morning after their arrival they looked out 

 of the window and saw a great cathedral across the way, and 

 one man said, "What a great pity it is that that grand cathedral 

 has never been completed, I can see only one tower and there 

 ought to be several towers." Instantly the poet Goethe 

 answered, *'Yes and it is an equal shame that the single tower 

 has never reached the fulfillment of its design." At that moment 



