PROCEEDINGS OF THE HORTICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 645 



of the mineral kinp:dom through the world of plants up to meet the realm 

 of animal organization with man at its head. The garden is thus mediate 

 between the mineral and the animal world, and has a wonderful chemistry 

 of its own that transforms soils of sand, loam, gravel and clay into the 

 juices and fibre of flowers, shrubs, and trees. The last great discovery of 

 chemistry brings out this power in clearer light by teaching us to see that 

 all atoms of organic existence consist of but two general classes, the crys- 

 talloid and the celloid; and it is with vegetation that nature passes from 

 the crystalloid to tlie celloid, and begins to build up her wondrous archi- 

 tecture of living things. How this is done we do not know. We see that 

 the crystals of sand and limestone are dissolved and transformed into the 

 starch and gluten of wheat and corn; but our chemical laboratories vainly 

 try to make the change with all their science and art; and all their retorts 

 and acids and blow-pipes have never been able to make bread or bread- 

 stuti' — not even an atom of starch or gluten — out of earth. Plants are 

 ordained of God to work this transformation from crystal to colloid, from 

 mineral to vegetable, and each plant has its own line of succession from 

 the beginning, and it does its wonderful work in its own way, and with the 

 same costume and implements as at the beginning. 



The study of the various soils themselves becomes most interesting in 

 itself and its correspondences. A man of observation may learn wisdom 

 for himself and his children by considering the qualities of his land and 

 what they stand for. The mind is sometimes thick and clayey, or light and 

 loamy, or drifting and sandy, or hard and gravelly — and in each case needs 

 as specific treatment as the soil. Sometimes, too, the good yield of most 

 forbidding soils gives us most encouraging hopes for unpromising children 

 •and youth. I once had five hundred loads, chiefly of clay, carted from a 

 dirty swamp-hole ta fill up a bog, and was frightened to see snch an un- 

 sightly vacancy in the first locality and such a cold, barren surface in the 

 second. But the empty hole soon became a pretty pond, and the dismal 

 clay-jsmiled and laughed itself into a green and luxuriant meadow. Who 

 will despair either of soils or souls.after such an experience? 



Then what a lesson a man may learn from the marvelous variety of 

 growths in his garden. Saintine, the author of that charming story of a 

 flower in a prison-yard, has lately died, and the grateful earth might fitly 

 bloom out violets, lilies and roses upon the grave of so loyal a lover of 

 nature and man. If his prison-hero found a world in that one plant that 

 pushed its way up between the stones, and became the subject of that 

 lovely prose-poem, we surely are more favored, and we all have field enough 

 for our survey and our pleasure. The little plots of a few square feet with 

 vine and n»ses behind our city houses, or the broad acres of our great park, 

 give us all our botanic garden, where we may be wiser with Ra}', and 

 Goeth.e, Linnaeus, and Jussieu, if we will. If the naked eye soon exhausts 

 its range in our little field of vision, try the microscope, and what wonders 

 disclose tlicmselves beneath our feet and give enchantment to the very dust 

 we tread ! I once passed the rambling* hours of a week in the cfiuntry in 

 this way, peeping into the grounds at the risk of being thought crazy, and 

 was ashamed of my old ignorance and astounded by the new-found wisdom. 

 Even in the hard paths under our feet there was a world of hidden beauty — 



