110 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Day after day the farmer's boy has worked among plants-r-has 

 he been learning to know them, and understand their language? 

 Is his mind filled with knowledge in consequence of seeing them 

 and does he love them and does his soul respond to their beauty- 

 with beautiful thoughts ? 



Alas, poor "Peter Bell!" 



I was a farmer boy, and it has been the regret of my life that my 

 opportunities for learning were lost because I had no teaching. 



How commonplace it was ! And what an education it might have 

 been, and how full of beauty and sweet companionship it might 

 have been then ! And what memories to cheer amid the cares of 

 later years I can only judge by the value I set on those I have and 

 the feeling of my loss. 



And I ask you who grew to manhood on the farm and have boy» 

 and girls at home, if they shall also miss the blessing that was- 

 denied their father? Or shall the school teach them^ as it did not 

 teach us? I hope so. They who dwell close to Nature's hearty 

 may find tongues in trees, books in the running brook, sermons in- 

 stones and good in everything. And I have only touched upon its 

 value as a helper in education. 



But plants are only a third of nature and if the child is taught 

 to observe and learn from all, what vistas of enduring pleasure are 

 before him ! And what fields of lifelong study are open especially 

 to the country boys and girls. 



One person sees more than another, not because his eyes are 

 better, but because his mind is trained to interpret the impressions 

 made upon the brain through the eye. What we see in things is 

 determined by what we know of them. We may all look at the 

 same things but no two will see the same thing for no two have the 

 same interpreting knowledge. 



We see with the mind, we do not see with the eyes, the eye is 

 but the window, the eye can not be educated any more than the 

 lens in your spectacles can be educated ; eyes, ears and all the 

 other organs of sense are but the instruments that the mind uses in 

 learning. In learning what? In learning the color, size, form and 

 properties of objects, primarily, but if that was all, our learning 

 would be useless. It is not all, for every faculty of the mind 

 stands ready to take what it can use of the materials brought in 

 through the senses, and the name of this material is ideas. That 

 in the mind which corresponds to the thing outside the mind and 

 the word we apply to the thing is the sign of the idea. 



