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CANADIAN WILD-FLOWERS.— I. 





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•jc E have many beautiful flowers growing in our woodlands 

 and meadows that can be used to adorn our homes, 

 belli in town and country. They can be transplanted 

 from their native localities at no other expense than a 

 few hours of the children's time, and will thrive in culti- 

 vation as well as in their woodland haunts, many of 

 them better. The expense of procuring flowering 

 plants deters some from planting them about their dwellings, and hence many, 

 especially of our rural homes, are so devoid of attractiveness in their surround- 

 ings. Now, this need not be, and, in truth, should not be. The influence of 

 the home in which the children are reared remains through life, and oftentimes, 

 nay, usually, shapes all their after years. If the influence of the home of our 

 children is refining, stimulating thought and observation, thus leading on to 

 useful reading, and intercourse with thinking minds, we may reasonably expect 

 that when they become men and women they will be persons of intelligence, and 

 therefore of influence. Our farmers, some of them at least, complain that they 

 are looked down upon by those in other walks of life, that they do not enjoy the 

 consideration and influence which their position, as producers of the wealth of 

 the country, entitles them. In some measure this may be true ; for the writer 

 has more than once heard it remarked that the farmers of Canada, as a class, 

 were at once the most suspicious and the most gullible of men. But in what- 

 ever measure the farmers fail of enjoying the consideration and influence which 

 they should possess, it is wholly their own fault. As a class they have been 

 prone to confine their attention to the mere routine of the farm, content to go 

 on in the methods of their ancestors, never enlarging their mental vision by 

 excursions into other fields than their own, or by indulging in studies or investi- 

 gations of natural science related closely to their daily pursuits. There is noth- 

 ing more true than that ignorance begets conceit. The ignorant man is the 

 man that thinks he knows it all, and those who attend the January meetings of 

 the 1-armers' Institutes will testify that those who stand most in need of informa- 

 tion are conspicuous by their absence. When the farmers of Canada lay aside 



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