80 SEMI-CENTENNIAL OF TORREY BOTANICAL CLUB 
To the publishers of this pioneer horticultural magazine it 
seemed a necessity to have an organ devoted entirely to botany, 
horticulture and pomology and of this necessity the Philadelphia 
Florist and Horticultural Journal was born. At the time of its 
first appearance there were journals that ‘‘dabbled”’ in the news 
of the farm and garden but this was the first strictly horticultural 
and agricultural journal to be attempted in the New World. 
New York too, at this time, had her horticultural dreams and 
ambitions and one of the first secretaries of a New York Horti- 
cultural Society was George William Curtis. 
Hon. Marshall P. Wilder of Massachusetts, no doubt a kins- 
man of our late beloved Prince of Entertainers, "Little Marsh," 
seems to have held the New England front. The Honorable 
Nicholas Longworth, of Ohio, was the active spirit in the horti- 
culture of the then far western limit of activity. 
On the last page of the last issue of the Philadelphia Florist 
and Horticultural Journal, we find notes of three other contem- 
porary journals, namely, the Western Agriculturist, published in 
Pittsburgh; the Homestead, published in Hartford, Conn.; and the 
Pennsylvania Farm Journal, published in Philadelphia by Messrs. 
Samuel Emlen & Co. and edited by David Wells and A. M. 
Spangler. Samuel Emlen still survives in our Germantown and 
he of all others was the most helpful spirit in encouraging these 
early garden publications. It was he who, with the late John 
Jay Smith, steadied the hand of the editor and proprietor of the 
pioneer Florist and Horticultural Journal, applauding him when he 
ran, lifting him when he fell, and enabling him honorably to pro- 
ceed with the work which made a place for the Journal and blazed 
the way for those that followed. From that early time till now 
the United States has been benefited by the stimulus of splendid 
horticultural journals until at the present time we find that 
flowers and fruits, deified by the refined ancients under the titles 
of Flora and Pomona, have unseated Jove, who grasped with mailed 
hand the thunderbolts of Heaven; and to-day, passing the City 
Hall of Philadelphia, we read the inspiring announcement, “ Food 
will win the war—don’t waste іё.” 
Reared then in the atmosphere of the stoke-hole among the 
: tobacco stems and grafting twine in the caboose at the end of the 
