THE STUDY ()F HORTICULTURE IX PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 1:^1 



iutcUeet of the present day is not equal to the problems presented 

 to it. This cannot be from a diminution of natural mental 

 capacity, but from some failure in training. 



It is a legitimate subject of inquiry, even though there be no 

 ground for present apprehension, whether there are any but 

 educational forms to remove the possibility of the world's seeing 

 repeated the supremacy of the few and the subservience of 

 millions marked by the ruins in the valleys of the Euphrates and 

 the Nile. 



The educational and social ferment of the present day is a 

 necessary result of the instinctive effort to adapt one's self to the 

 universe in which he is placed, an effort which becomes intelligent 

 and volitional so far as the true relations to that universe are 

 clearly perceived. Mighty civilizations have flourished and have 

 then been overwhelmed and lost in the revolutions and destruction 

 of empires. To trace the causes of their triumph and decadence 

 is a legitimate exercise of the intellect, but this exercise is one of 

 the luxuries of scholarship. Something else is needed to make a 

 people citizens of their own time and participants in the culture of 

 their own generation. However many lost arts there may have 

 been ; whatever the character of the sciences the knowledge of 

 which may have disappeared, the sciences and the arts — not the 

 art — which mainl}^ give shape and direction to the civilization of 

 the present day, are the growth of the last one hundred years, and 

 most of the education which possesses real power at the present 

 day is new education. There are only degrees of newness. As a 

 necessary result of the newness of scientific and practical culture, 

 there are gaps to fill out in the system, — there is imperative 

 demand for improvement in method. 



In this general discussion it has been my purpose to emphasize 

 the fact that the question which the Horticultural Society this day 

 raises is a part of that larger question of educational advance now 

 moving the thought of the world. And now I would state some 

 grounds for the conviction that the introduction of the study of 

 horticulture into the common school course will supph^ a force still 

 lacking in our means of culture ; that such introduction is easilj' 

 practicable in country and city schools, and that there is good 

 reason to believe that such an extension of the course of study 

 will sers'e, in some measure at least, to palliate, when it does not 

 remove, economic, moral, and social ills, the existence of which 

 we deplore. 



