as if a law school had no professorship expounding the principles ol 

 the common and civil laws, which must be the foundation of the 

 lawyer's professional acquirements, or if a theological school failed 

 to require a knowledge of the Greek and Hebrew languages, which 

 alone can enable the candidate for orders to expound the BCriptures 

 in spirit and in truth. 



Besides your other valuable services in behalf of education the 

 State of Louisiana owes you a debt of gratitude for the exertions 

 made by you in providing the means to prosecute the botanical 

 inrvey of the State, which will acquire for the University — strictly 

 a State institution — one of the most valuable scientific collections, 

 that will last for centuries if properly eared for, and which money 

 could not buy nor favor procure. It is tit that Louisiana, the 

 Empire State of the South-west, with its imm use agricultural 

 resources and its network of navigable streams, should be the first 

 of all the States to place botany side by side with geology in the 

 investigation of the physical and economic resources of the State. 



The popular idea of a geological survey is that the geologist is 

 prospecting — using an expressive term of the California miner — in 

 order to discover the Ophir where gold is as abundant as common? 

 dust: or to find the New Castle where coal constitutes the solid cruet 

 of the earth. But these popular notions about geology have no ap- 

 plication to Louisiana, for the nature of the geological formation of 

 the S>ate, is sufficient for the scientific geologist to determine at 

 once, that these materials do not and can nor, exist here in a form 

 to give them economic value. But while geology lias undoubtedly 

 a scientific and a practical side, botany has no less so. It is a 

 curious fact in the history of education, that educated men should 

 be entirely ignorant of the vegetable kingdom, which furnishes us 

 with the brend we eat, the wine we drink, the IVu ts we relish, the 

 clothing we wear, the most ornamental parts of the dwel ings we 

 inhabit, the light which changes the n ; ght into day, the ships as well 

 as the materials of commerce which they transport, the fuel which 

 equalizes the seasons and supplies the m >tive power of the steam 

 eng.ne and the locomotive. The vegetable kingdom, without which 

 no living creature that breathes can live, is the most rich in re- 

 sources and the most important in a commercial, artistic, mechanical 

 and agricultural point of view. The study of botany is not only of 

 the greatest interest to the natural philosopher, but it deserves to be 



