of wheat, or corn, or
other useful plant, and make permanent such of them as show special
richness of yield; earliness in ripening; stoutness of resistance to
Jack Frost, or blight, or insect pests. Suppose that dire disaster
swept from off the earth every cereal used as food. Professor Goodale,
Professor Asa Gray's successor at Harvard University, has so much
confidence in the experiment stations of America that he deems them well
able to repair the loss we have imagined; within fifty years, he thinks,
from plants now uncultivated the task could be accomplished. Among the
men who have best served the world by hastening nature's steps in the
improvement of flowers and fruits, stands Mr. Vilmorin, of Paris. He it
was who in creating the sugar beet laid the foundation for one of the
chief industries of our time. One of his rules is to select at first not
the plant which varies most in the direction he wishes, but the plant
that varies most in any direction whatever. From it, from the
instability of its very fibres, its utter forgetfulness of ancestral
traditions, he finds it easiest in the long run to obtain and to
establish the character he seeks of sweetness, or size, or colour.

Of flowering plants there are about 110,000, of these the farmer and the
gardener between them have scarcely tamed and trained 1,000. What new
riches, therefore, may we not expect from the culture of the future?
Already in certain northern flower-pots the trillium, the bloodroot, the
dog's-tooth violet, and the celandine are abloom in May; as June
advances, the wild violet, the milkweed, the wild lily-of-the-valley,
unfold their petals; later in summer the dog-rose displays its charms
and breathes its perfume. All respond kindly to care, and were there
more of this hospitality, were the wild roses which the botanist calls
_blanda_ and _lucida_, were the cardinal flowers, the May flowers, and
many more of the treasures of glen and meadow, made welcome with
thoughtful study of their wants and habits, much would be done to extend
the wealth of our gardens. Let a hepatica be plucked from its home in a
rocky crevice where one marvels how it ever contrived to root itself and
find subsistence. Transplant it to good soil, give it a little care--it
asks none--and it will thrive as it never throve before; proving once
again that plants do not grow where they like, but where they can. The
Russian columbine rewards its cultivator with a wealth of blossoms t