REPORTS TO THE STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 371 



(It is, no doubt, very gratifying to be able to say that you have 

 seen a two-thousand-dollar orchid, but 3'ou feel something like the 

 man who, having completed the reading of Milton, thanked Heaven 

 he should never have to do it again.) 



The absence of that finest of the florist's flowers, the pansy, 

 was very marked. Hardly any competitors appeared for the 

 special prizes offered, and but a handful of flowers were to be seen 

 anywhere. 



An interesting exhibition in the fruit line was a basket of pears 

 from the original Bartlett pear tree (that is, the first tree imported 

 into this country), which stands in what was the garden of the late 

 Enoch Bartlett, in Roxbur}', but which is now in possession of the 

 Little Sisters of the Poor. Another, was the instructive display 

 from the Arnold Arboretum of native and foreign ornamental fall 

 fruits of shrubs, together with which were some dozen varieties of 

 the crab apple, illustrating its gradual development from fruit the 

 size of a pea into the large crab apples of today. 



With its accustomed liberality, the Horticultural Society offered 

 special prizes, amounting to $500, for excellence in fruit at this 

 exhibition . 



The final exhibition, the Show of Chrysanthemums, was a fitting 

 culmination to the work of the j-ear. It is impossible in words 

 to adequately express the wondrous beauty of the scene on look- 

 ing down upon it from the gallery above. The wealth of color, 

 shading into every tint of the rainbow was surprising, while 

 matchless in their simplicity, rose the pure white forms of other 

 varieties. Involuntarily, there came into the mind, the ancient 

 myth of the marriage of the balmy "West Wind with Flora and the 

 consequent embroidering of the earth with flowers. " Ofttimes," 

 she saj's, " have I desired to reckon the tints as they were 

 arranged and I could not, for their multitude exceeded all num- 

 bers." But alas ! how the poetry vanished into air before the 

 stern reality of fact. "No marriage service," as Mr. Thorpe 

 prettily puts it, " had been read over the union of these flowers by 

 passing mother butterfly," but the plain, prosaic, fine camel's hair 

 brush, transferring the pollen from the stamens of the one flower 

 to the pistils of the other, had brought about these wonderful 

 results. Art had done away with nature's aids. 



