THE AMERICAN EDITION. 
VII 
useful purpose; the carrying of a weight from one point to an- 
other and back again ; or the taking of a walk without any object 
in view but the negative one of preserving health. Thus, it is 
not only a condition of our nature that, in order to secure health 
and cheerfulness, we must labour, but we must also labour in 
such a way as to produce something useful or agreeable. Now, 
of the different kinds of useful things produced by labour, those 
things surely, which are living beings, and which grow and 
undergo changes before our eyes, must be more productive of 
enjoyment than such as are mere brute matters, the kind of 
labour and other circumstances being the same. Hence, a man 
who plants a hedge or sows a grass plot in his garden, lays a more 
certain foundation for enjoyment than he who builds a wall, or 
lays down a gravel walk; and hence the enjoyment of a citizen 
whose recreation, at his suburban residence, consists in working 
in his garden, must be higher in the scale than that of him who 
amuses himself in the plot round his house, with shooting at a 
mark or playing at bowls. 
“ One of the greatest of all the sources of enjoyment resulting 
from the possession of a garden, is the endless variety it produces, 
either by the perpetual progress of vegetation, which is going 
forward in it to maturity, dormancy or decay, or by the almost 
innumerable kinds of plants which may be raised in even the 
smallest garden. Even the same trees, grown in the same 
garden, are undergoing perpetual changes throughout the year; 
and trees change, also, in every succeeding year, relatively to 
that which is past, because they become larger and larger as they 
advance in age, and acquire more of their characteristic and 
mature forms. The number of plants, and especially of trees, 
which can be cultivated in a suburban garden at one time, is 
necessarily circumscribed; but if a suburban amateur chose to 
limit the period, during which he cultivated each tree or plant, 
to the time of its flowering with him for the first time, he might 
in the course of a few years, more or less in number according to 
the size of his garden, have had growing in it all the plants in 
cultivation in the open air in Britain, with the exception of a 
few of the larger of the forest trees ; and even these he might 
also have flowered by making use of plants raised from cuttings 
