THE LADIES’ FLORAL CABINET. 
319 
in a business way, when sent from home for an education, 
to every one that has been benefited. The first step 
toward a useful education is to inoculate the minds of our 
children with noble thought. Teach your children to 
think for themselves, and they will be apt to act wisely. 
If a child gets the impression that there is nothing on the 
farm but hard work and little money, he will very soon 
come to the conclusion that he will find an occupation 
where there is. but little work and much money. But let 
a child learn and feel that home is the pleasantest spot 
on earth, and that his highest ambition should be to 
secure one and surround it with all the luxuries that rural 
life affords, and a useful education has been entered upon. 
A child should be taught quite as much from the heart as 
from books. The knowledge he obtains from school 
alone is usually of a character that draws the mind of 
the student from agricultural pursuits. His studies are 
such as tend to so direct his thoughts and feelings that 
when he leaves school he has no sympathy for the busi¬ 
ness he is expected to follow for a living. 
But it was not my intention to dwell so long on this 
part of my subject, but rather to call your attention to 
the pleasures'to be found on the farm ; pleasures I would 
that all could enjoy, for there is not a more pitiable ob¬ 
ject in life than a man following an occupation in which 
there is no pleasure. Schools are indispensable to the 
welfare of the community, yet they do not accomplish the 
purposes for which schools were intended, neither can 
they until the teachers are taught the importance of think¬ 
ing as well as of reading. If you desire your children 
to love farming let them study the farm and its products. 
Not from books, but from the farm itself. Books exert 
either a good or a bad influence, as you may will. If you 
can discriminate and make an application to your busi¬ 
ness pursuits of the truths laid down in the book, it will 
be of great value to you, as the book is but the record 
of someone’s practice and theory. If it feeds you, very 
well; if it absorbs you, it were better never to have 
seen it. 
The book for every farmer’s boy to read is the open 
book of nature. There was none ever written that con¬ 
tains one-half of the information, none other half so fas¬ 
cinating, none so perfect and pure. Nature teaches us to 
dwell as much as possible upon the beautiful and good, 
and to ignore at all times the evil and the false. 
Let us take a single tree for an object lesson and see 
what it will teach us. Time will not permit of our dis¬ 
cussing the phenomena of plant life, and we will only say 
that vegetable and animal lives in no way differ in 
principle; there is a perfect analogy between the two. 
But in order to show you the pleasure there is to be de¬ 
rived from the study of the tree, we would say that all 
plants possess a real life—they eat, drink, feel and think ; 
they sleep, breathe and secrete—in short perform all the 
functions of supply, repair, development and reproduc¬ 
tion. The intelligence they manifest in searching for 
food is simply wonderful,, while the actions of climbing 
plants in search of supports are equally strange. All these 
wonderful peculiarities of plants are but little seen or ap¬ 
preciated. In fact, not one man in ten ever saw the true 
roots of a a tree, or knows that they are put forth in spring 
simultaneously with the leaves and are shed with them in 
autumn. 
To make the farm attractive, show the child its attrac¬ 
tions ; how plants know when there has been a store¬ 
house of food placed within their reach, and will imme¬ 
diately turn their attention to it. Show how each and 
every plant takes from the earth and atmosphere different 
elementary substances, and how they are stored up for 
our use. Show the child the plant’s adaptation to the 
necessities of other living organisms in the localities where 
they are indigenous; how that in every locality the ani¬ 
mal and plant support and sustain each other, and in 
the end consume each other. The breath of the ox is 
the food of the plant upon which he fattens. 
How interesting it is to watch the plant industries as 
they are carried on side by side, each doing its own 
work wisely and well and without exciting in the least 
the envy of its neighbor, and without contention or strife. 
We see the maple collecting saccharine juices ; the pine, 
rosin ; the poppy, opium ; the oak, tannin, and so on 
through the list. In our gardens the aconite collects a 
deadly poison which it stores up in its tubers, and by its 
side the potato gathers in starch for the sustenance of 
man. The plant’s adaptation to the soil and climate in 
which it is to grow is one of the most beautiful and 
useful studies for the old as well as the young. 
The form, variety and extent of the vegetation of a 
country depend altogether upon the existing elementary 
substances which they were created to utilize for the 
benefit of other creations. A remarkable instance of this 
adaptation is to be found in the Cinchona calisaya, a 
strong, rapid-growing, ornamental evergreen shrub, or 
low-growing tree, which abounds in the malarial districts 
of Peru, and which has a world-wide reputation for the 
medicinal properties contained in its bark. The active 
principle in the bark of this tree is an alkaloid which 
abounds in the atmosphere of its native home. The 
traveler in passing through the districts where this tree 
abounds soon becomes enervated, and in a short time 
fever-stricken, the result of inhaling the impure atmos¬ 
phere of that country, the atmosphere upon which the 
cinchona subsists, and from which, by a chemical process 
of its own, it elaborates the valuable medicinal property, 
an almost universal remedy for malarial fevers. This is 
one of the strongest proofs of the science of homoeopa¬ 
thy. It proves beyond question the Hahnemann theory, 
Similia similibus curantur , not alone because of the 
fact that this tree abounds in those malarial districts and 
stores up in its bark the drug that allays malarial fevers, 
and which is besides so powerful a tonic, but because of 
the fact that the same tree planted in situations where 
malaria does not exist does not have in its bark any of 
that active principle known as quinia, one of the forms of 
which is quinine. 
So valuable is the bark of this tree as an article of 
commerce that its cultivation in other countries, where 
climate and soil were favorable for its production, has 
been attempted. Large plantations were made in the 
South of France, in Spain and in Italy, and in each case 
the attempt proved a failure, from the fact that the drug 
in an elementary state did not exist in the soil of its 
