ABOUT FiyjlTS, FLOWERS AND FARMING. 279 



no process of the laboratory, no minute dissections or nice 

 calculations ; it requires only that a man should see what 

 he looks at. 



When a boy, plapng " how many fingers do I hold up," 

 by dint of peeping from under the bandage, we managed to 

 make very clever guesses of how many lily-fingers some 

 roguish lassie was holding in tempting show before our ban- 

 daged eyes ; but some folks are not half so lucky with both 

 eyes wide open, and the stamens and pistils standing before 

 them. 



If such a latitude is permitted to those who conduct the 

 investigations peculiar to hoi'ticulture, who can confide in 

 the publication of facts, observations or experiments ? Of 

 what use will be jouraals and magazines? They become 

 like chronometers that will not keep time ; like a compass 

 that has lost its magnetic sensibility ; like a guide Mho has 

 lost his o\\Ti way, and leads his followers through brake, 

 and morass, and thicket, into interminable wanderings. 

 Sometimes, the consciousness of faults in ourselves, which 

 should make us lenient toward others, only serves to pro- 

 duce irritable fault-finding. After a comparison of opinions 

 and facts, through a space of five years, with the most dis- 

 tinguished cultivators, East and West, Mr. Longworth is 

 now universally admitted to have sustained himself in all 

 the essential points which he first promulgated — not discov- 

 ered, for he made no claims of that sort. The gardeners 

 and the magazines of the East have, at length, adopted his 

 practical views, after having stoutly, many of them, con- 

 tested them. 



It was, therefore, with unfeigned surprise, that we read 

 Mr. Hovey's latest remarks in the September number of his 

 magazine, in which, with some asperity, he roundly charges 

 Mr. Longworth with manifold errors, and treats him with 

 a contempt which would lead one, ignorant of the con- 

 troverey, to suppose that Mr. Hovey had never made a 

 mistake, and that Mr. Longworth had been particularly 



