March 28, 1919] 



SCIENCE 



299 



ous aspects, may become the inspiration 

 and means of a liberal education. 



It is probable that the immediate future 

 will offer unusual opportunities in horti- 

 culture as in all other fields of worth while 

 human endeavor. The restoration of de- 

 vastated Europe will not be complete until 

 it includes the esthetic as well as the merely 

 utilitarian. Already the call has come to 

 this country for trained gardeners, for the 

 Hun's conception of the exigencies of war 

 has included the wholesale destruction of 

 trees, parks, orchards and gardens. It is 

 worthy of mention at this time and place 

 that the American Horticultural Society 

 has already collected and forwarded to 

 France the sum of several thousand dollars 

 to be expended in the replacing of ruined 

 fruit trees and orchards. 



The need here at home has never been 

 greater. The truth of Lord Bacon's state- 

 ment has found abundant confirmation in 

 America, for, notwithstanding the early in- 

 troduction of nurseries and horticulture in 

 the colonies — notably by the Princes, 

 father, son and grandson, on Long Island 

 (1725 and later), by Bartram (1728), 

 Evans and Humphrej^ Marshall near Phila- 

 delphia, by Andrew Jackson Downing 

 ("perhaps the fairest name in American 

 horticultural literature"), by David Ho- 

 sack (1801) in New York, by M'Mahon 

 (1800), Bloodgood (1820), Hogg (1834), 

 Parsons (1838), Landreth (1874), Thor- 

 burn (1802), and a host of other pioneers — 

 notwithstanding these early labors, subse- 

 quent development has been slow. But we 

 have now passed the pioneer stage of na- 

 tional development, and the conditions 

 which, for a time, justified our shortcom- 

 ings in esthetics have ceased to exist; the 

 forests are cleared, the frontier has van- 

 ished, mud huts and log cabins (mere 

 houses) have given place to real homes. 

 We have even managed to survive the peri- 



ods of mansard roofs and brown stone 

 fronts, and our villages and cities have al- 

 ready begun to recognize the value of hor- 

 ticulture and landscape gardening in ma- 

 king centers of business places of beauty 

 as well. 



See your vocation, then, in broad perspec- 

 tive — in its relation to the sum total of 

 things; to social needs, spiritual needs, 

 civic needs, human needs — the development 

 of your own character, of a more refined 

 and cultured national character. We are 

 living in one of the most, if not the most 

 momentous period in human history. It is 

 a wonderful privilege to be alive now — to 

 be a part of all that is transpiring, to be 

 entering now upon one's life work. Never 

 has there been a greater need for the best 

 in all things. The self-revelation of the un- 

 speakable Hun has left us with a feeling of 

 disgust, as if we had been in contact with 

 something base and unclean, as indeed we 

 have ; and the need was never so urgent as 

 now for an increase of knowledge and the 

 wide diffusion of truth and of spiritual and 

 material beauty. It is your function and 

 privilege to cooperate with the architect, 

 the landscape architect, the town planner, 

 in making beautiful the habitations of men. 



There are those to-day who are crying 

 aloud in the land that the work before us of 

 educational reconstruction shall be charac- 

 terized by making everything primarily or 

 even exclusively "practical" — by choosing 

 our studies and placing our emphasis 

 chiefly with reference to bread-and-butter 

 considerations. This is the great danger 

 ahead of us in our program of education ; 

 it is quite as unfortunate to lose sight of the 

 ideal as to forget the material needs of life. 

 A Brooklyn divine has terselj^ said that, in 

 hitching his wagon to a star, the idealist has 

 chiefly in mind the star, while the adminis- 

 trator — the man of affairs — has chiefly 

 in mind the wagon. Hitch your wagon to a 



