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Vol. I. MADISON, WIS., DECEMBER, 1874. No. 3. DECEMBER NOTES, For men in general, the place in which they live is their world—all the world—no matter whether they live in a mud hovel or in a mansion. But for those who in any measure cultivate the sciences, or who feel an interest in watching- their progress, their world is the universe itself, to which they are bound by every prompting of their nature—by every invisible link of their intelligence. Their sympathies, as well as their interests, connect them with everything that moves and breathes and lives. Man himself, being- related to all things in the kingdom of nature, is but a part of the great whole. To no class of men does this remark ap- ply more forcibly than to the horticulturist. All the earth is his garden. Not a wind that blows, not a wave that rolls, but bears to him a living reminder that the comers of the earth are his; and the little flower, nay the single leaf, the smallest seed, serves, by expanding- his vision, by the awakening of his interest, but to bind him to his fellow man. Horticulture, as popularly received, is but an art having relationship only with the spade, the rake and the soil, and per- haps this idea is correct, as far as art is concerned. But horticulture is something more than this,—it is a science, having a far higher relationship, a relationship of the closest kind, with other, her sister sci- ences: with botany, chemistry, entomology, geology, geography, astronomy, with light and heat, etc.; a knowledge more or less of all these going to constitute the true horticulturist. Hence it is, as we have claimed, the horticulturist's world is the world universal—the earth, the sea, the heavens. And his home is everywhere where a flower shall bloom, or a fruit shall grow, or a people dwell, to love the one or need the other. But turn Ave to consider either the useful or the beautiful in this science, how often are we met with prejudice—the pre- judice that no art can change, no science enlighten. There are those who see nei- ther wisdom, nor goodness, nor power, nor divinity in the beautiful,—forgetting, or rather ignoring, what is in beauty so self-evident: that none but the highest wisdom can conceive; none but the greatest goodness would bestow; none but the most supreme power could create; and inasmuch as all finite power, however it may change, modify and color, must for- ever, as from the beginning, fail to create the simplest flower, so even the simplest flower itself, exquisite as it is in all its parts, and above all in its adaptability, must be the work of the Infinite. To say then that the beautiful is not the useful, or that a flower, since it exhibits so many divine attributes, has no use, is simply to say that you are wiser than God—wiser than Him who made you,—you, whose use it were just as well to question. It is a question full of concern, that in an intelligent age like this and in a coun