HORTICULTURAL EDUCATION FOR CHILDREN. 179 



with the certain prospect of largely reducing the current expenses 

 for the second season. If it can be shown in connection with 

 one school, that the school garden is entirely practicable and 

 comparatively inexpensive, it will not be long before other schools, 

 in the suburbs at least if not in the city, will wish to establish 

 school gardens. If their success has been complete in thousands 

 of cases in Europe, they will succeed here. 



I trust you will think with me, that the length of this paper is 

 by no means commensurate with the importance of the subject of 

 it, — Horticultural Education for Children. 



The exhibition of work done by the pupils of the George Put- 

 nam School, included many drawings from life of a great variety 

 of plants, and ornamental designs in which the leaves and flowers 

 of gathered specimens were used as models for the parts. The 

 whole showed much skill and taste, and evidence of a strong 

 interest in the work on the part of the young artists. 



The essay was applauded at the close, and a vote of thanks to 

 Mr. Clapp for his valuable paper, which would benefit not only 

 the present generation but the generations to come, was unani- 

 mously passed. 



Discussion. 



E. H. Hitchings said that the essay just read recalled a para- 

 graph in Higginson's "Out-Door Papers," a book which every 

 lover of Nature should read. On page 243 he sa^'s : "It is no 

 wonder that there is so little enjoyment of Nature in the commu- 

 nity when we feed our children on grammars and dictionaries only, 

 and take no pains to train them to see that which is before theiT 

 eyes. The mass of the community have ' summered and wintered ' 

 the universe pretty regularly, one would think, for a good many 

 years ; and ^et nine out of ten in the town or city, and two out 

 of three even in the country, seriously suppose, for instance, that 

 the buds upon trees are formed in the spring ; they have had them 

 within sight all winter, and never seen them. So people suppose, 

 in good faith, that a plant grows at the base of the stem, instead 

 of at the top ; that is, if they see a young sapling in which there 

 is a crotch at five feet from the ground, they expect to see it ten 

 feet from the ground by and by, — confounding the growth of a 

 tree with that of a man or animal." Mr. Hitchings cited as an 



