134 PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-SIXTH FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 



for the occupation of his sire, the old hayseed with a goat beard on 

 his chin, chewing Star tobacco and saying "By Heck" and "Gosh-all- 

 hemloek. " That is what he absorbs from the literature with which he 

 comes in contact. The only way to train a child is to train him when 

 he is young. One wise person went further than that when penal 

 reform was under discussion, when he said. "The way to begin reform- 

 ing young Smith is to reform his grandfather." But in this respect 

 it is time that the people of this republic teach, through all the agencies 

 that instruct the young, that there is something in the world besides 

 war, that there is some glory beside that won by commanders who lead 

 hosts to slay. It is time that we began in our schools, both country and 

 city, to teach that the foundation of all things is in the tilling of the 

 soil and that, therefore, to the tiller of the soil is due the first honors. 

 It is time that we should go back, if necessary, to Virgil and Pliny 

 Secundus and have some man among us who shall originate a literature 

 that shall teach the utility, the romance, the imaginative elements that 

 are in the rural occupations of the republic in every one of its states, 

 so that, through the literature absorbed in the schools, our young 

 may find out something about that great industry upon which all 

 other industries depend. 



"God planted a garden eastward in Eden." It was a garden. How 

 inane and silly that line would be if in Genesis it had been said that 

 God planted a brewery eastward in Eden or a drug store or a lawyer's 

 office [laughter], or something else of that sort, but he planted a 

 garden completely stocked with things that grow in the ground, and 

 it is well to go back to that. The Agricultural Department in Wash- 

 ington, to which we owe not only the millions and millions that it has 

 added to the crops of this country by increasing the fertility of the 

 soil, but a mighty stimulus that has gone through all the nerves of the 

 agricultural and rural people of this country, a stimulus that is begin- 

 ning to teach them that scientific agriculture is one of the highest of 

 all the arts, that it deserves to rank with what we call the learned pro- 

 fessions, with law, physic, and theology. We owe all this to the Agri- 

 cultural Department; but that corps of splendidly trained gentlemen 

 in that department have observed the necessity of beginning in the 

 schools of the country, teaching the young something that will interest 

 them in agriculture, and to that end that department has undertaken 

 by the spread of bulletins to impress upon the people of the country 

 especially the need of introducing something about agriculture and 

 horticulture and their allied arts into the public schools. 



Why, think of it. You just listened here to a splendid paper that 

 will go into your transactions and be a text-book upon the subject, a 

 splendid paper upon insect and fungus pests, involving that most inter- 

 esting subject, vegetable pathology. We call the doctor who cures us 

 of a stomach ache or a soft corn or an ingrowing nail or something of 

 that kind. The vegetable pathologist, who finds out vegetable diseases, 

 is following a profession much more difficult to practice successfullv 

 than that of the physician, because we can tell where our pain is. 

 which rib hurts and where the rheumatism is attacking us and in what 

 kind of weather, but the vegetable can not utter its complaint. The 

 study has to be entirely from the external, and vegetable pathology 

 opens out to young men with a scientific turn one of the most important 



