7th March, A. D. 1895. 



ESSAY 



BY 



Dr. C. F. HODGE, Clark University, Worcester. 



Theme : — Botanical Gardens. 



In almost any language, savage or civilized, before the beginnings 

 of authentic history, we have dim legends and myths of a blissful 

 existence in garden paradises where " every tree that is pleasant to 

 the sight and good for food" grew of its own accord, and man's work 

 and pleasure was to tend the garden and enjoy its beauties and fruits. 

 If only things pleasing to the eye and good for food were sole occu- 

 pants of the soil, the world might be a good deal of a paradise still. 

 At first sight tliis seems to be far from the case. Thistles and thorns, 

 weeds and briars, dispute the field with roses and strawberries ; and, 

 too often, owing to man's poor tending, gain the upper hand. From 

 this point of view the world is :ill a tangle of thorns and a vale of 

 tears. Paradise is a long ways back ; lost, in fact, in the irrevok- 

 able past. But is this view of nature the best after all ? The world 

 grows many things of the greatest value with no aid of man's tending. 

 Even thistles and briars are better than drifting sands and barren rock : 

 and to the indulgent eye of a botanist, even the most pestiferous 

 weeds are often most "pleasing to the sight"; and I know that he 

 would not for the world have one of them stricken utterly from his 

 list. With proper tending, man's first appointed work, almost any 

 plot of Mother P^arth can be transformed into an Eden to any man's 

 own taste. As human nature is now constituted, however, two 

 things stand in the way of perfect attainment of anything very Edenic 

 in the way of gardens. The first of these is that men nowadays are 

 either too lazy or too busy about other things to attend to even a 

 small piece of ground in the way Adam was instructed to do it. The 

 other reason is that men have lost their taste for Eden. A good 



