106 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



You asked me to talk on "plant study" and for fear that you 

 might think I had lost the plant in nature I brought here the branch 

 of a plant; a plant that is familiar to you all, so familiar indeed, 

 that I can tell you nothing of it that you did not kuow before, and 

 yet you are learning something new from it every year. These 

 boys and girls know it ; and perhaps they know that the Pomologi- 

 cal society takes its name from the fruit of the tree to which this 

 branch belongs. 



Yes, it is an apple tree branch and it can tell the children many 

 wonderful things of itself and its brothers and sisters at home, and 

 best of all, if they cultivate its acquaintance, it will introduce them 

 to hosts of interesting friends in the great plant family. 



With your mind's eye look at the little apple tree you set out last 

 spring and see if we can find worthy subjects for the child to study. 

 You see it as a whole, but the tree like most living things, consists 

 -of parts and each part has its work to do and all of them depend 

 upon each other. Its root hidden from sight reaches down into 

 the soil reaching out and grasping with its woody fingers and hold- 

 ing on against the wind and other forces that try to tear it from 

 earth. Evei'y year it pushes itself farther and farther into the 

 darkness and damp of the ground that its trunk may grow larger 

 and its branches spread wider in the air and sunlight and bear 

 leaves and flowers and fruit. 



Root, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers and fruit, each is a 

 whole that also consists of parts, and each part has its own charac- 

 teristic qualities and uses ; and each leads the child to new fields of 

 observation and thought. Cut off the trunk and on the smoothed 

 end of the section you have made you read a whole chapter of its 

 life. At the center you see the white pith and around it the dark 

 heart wood ; next the rings of lighter sap wood and encircling all 

 the green bark covered with its smooth brown skin. You know 

 how it looks in the older tree, the pith no larger than this for it is 

 dead and the heart wood darker and also dead, and the sap wood 

 through whose little tubes passes the liquid food and drink to the 

 baby buds and to the life cells that are building a new circle of 

 wood under its jacket of bark. You and I know how this looked 

 and felt on the sticks of the willow whistles we used to make and 

 we know how it lasted in the "sliver" of the pine and we know 

 how sick and pitiful the poor tree looked later in the summer, with 

 its wounded body covered with pitchy blood and perhaps dying. 



