328 Cypripedia. 



what the best books in the different departments of literature, the chief 

 merits of the different schools of art, and the rareness and peculiarities of 

 the different classes of plants. I am just amateur enough in these things 

 to enjoy understandingly the best. The profit of this innocent pleasure is 

 not, generally, correctly estimated. To study for the purpose of becoming 

 an author, a botanist, or a painter, is accounted worth the doing ; but to 

 inform one's self for the mere pleasure of appreciation is hardly deemed 

 meritorious, certainly not profitable. The great moral advantage is not 

 perceived. The intellectual and spiritual profit is not inculcated in ordi- 

 nary arithmetics, especially as to the acquirement of knowledge and taste 

 respecting pictures and flowers. I hold, however, that all knowledge is 

 profit ; that taste is the result of knowledge, or at least dependent upon it. 

 But to demonstrate the profit derived from the study of pictures and flow- 

 ers would lead me into a discussion of the philosophy of life, and the 

 nature and meaning of profit, which had better not be indulged in at the 

 present time. Civilization is cultivation, and the highest civilization 

 reaches into and is distinguished by exalted education in art. Horticulture 

 is art, and high art too, as decidedly as literature, music, painting, and 

 sculpture. At the Botanical Congress in London last summer, the impor- 

 tance of horticulture to botany and agriculture was fully explained, as also 

 its general beneficial influence upon the moral and material interests of 

 mankind, in the discussions evoked, and especially in the able and exhaus- 

 tive essay of the president, M. de Candolle of Geneva. Its usefulness is 

 recognized by scientific minds throughout the world, and is being devel- 

 oped, in a practical sense, by every year's added experiments. The profit, 

 in a scientific way, is readily understood. The trouble is to see its value 

 in the moral scale, and to admit the importance of its influence upon man's 

 moral nature and upon the moral interests of society. The romantic asso- 

 ciations of flowers, their poetic status, the most unappreciative will not 

 deny ; but picturesqueness, they contend, is not virtue, and aesthetics are 

 not a safe code of morals. Yet, as we are surrounded by objects which 

 appeal directly through our senses, it certainly seems wise that we should 

 cultivate our senses to appreciate what is best and purest and most refined. 

 The study of the beautiful is ennobling in directing our thoughts to the 

 contemplation of whatever is symmetrical and graceful and pure and true. 



