"The most highly esteemed favour which the early missionaries at Tahiti could confer on the king and queen was to furnish them each, on state occasions, with a specimen of that splendid novelty, the Sun-nower, to be worn in their dusky bosoms." - Quarterly Review.

WE lately returned from an excursion through one of the finest valleys the sun ever shone upon. Wheat, oats, corn, and potatoes, are cultivated in the neatest and most successful manner; up to the very fences the products for man and beast are grown without a weed. Limestone in abundance gives annual verdure to this large and lovely valley. Every farm has a good house upon it, and this is generally exceeded in size by the barn, at this moment bursting with fatness. As the eye glanced over the fields of mixed orange and green, the harvester in motion, and the tractable animals obeying the behests of the owners, we could but ask, "What wants this scene of loveliness?"

We were domiciled at a watering-place overlooking the broad acres, and saw the well-grown grain collected from a thousand fields. Our table was bountiful in meats and bread, and unexceptionably attended; but the fruits upon it were precisely those in favor before the Revolutionary War. The raspberries and strawberries were wild ones; the cherries, honey and black-heart. Why should this be?

Let us ride through this lovely scene. You may do so for an entire day with farms after farms succeeding each other, but you see no ornamental planting, no garden, no lawn. We did not find on such excursions an evergreen tree nor an asparagus bed! Two yuccas in bloom, at long intervals, were the sole flowers, except a few of the older kinds of hollyhocks, which seem to have flourished in spite of want of culture. The potato field or the grain crop, amidst a few utterly neglected old apple-trees, comes within a few feet of the mansion, whose best rooms are almost always shut up and the family of hard workers residing in the kitchen. This is no fancy picture. It is a superior one to the vast majority presented throughout our great and prosperous country, where "door-yards" with pigs for tenants are the rule, too often, rather than the exception. In our happy looking valley, money is the great good; to raise the greatest crops gives the greatest distinction, and thus from father to son has it gone on; generation after generation come to look at the beautiful scene, to work hard upon it, to live without intellectual cultivation or amusement, and to die and be forgotten as their fathers died.

Can no tocsin be sounded in the deaf and dull ears of these practical farmers? Can we not awaken them to the beauty and utility of fine fruit, to the study of the superiority of one tree, plant, or flower, over another? Shall all future descendants of these rich people go to their last rest without one glimpse of nature's adornings? How shall we come at their darkened imaginations, and how show them the beauty of loveliness? That we cannot reach them by any scheme yet devised by the Patent Office, seems certain; that no number of the Horticulturist is taken in the county we could safely assert. Must we leave the spot to be never again attracted to it? or shall we return, in imagination, some thirty or fifty years hence, and find a portion of the pig-rooted "door-yard" blossoming with the rose?

The way to accomplish so desirable an end is not difficult to suggest Let a benevolent mind take to this somewhat benighted region a nursery. Let him show the Triomphe de Gand, or Hovey's Strawberries; let him give to the first housewife who will listen to him a few plants of fine raspberries, show some fine flowers, and gradually gather round him a lover or two of handsome trees, till soon he organizes a Horticultural Society, and by emulation sows the seed of future progress. Here is a fine field for benevolence, for usefulness, and for training immortal minds to something more ambitiously useful than the continuous pursuit of grain and potatoes engenders.

Every one at all conversant with the present condition of Horticulture will admit that its state and prospects were never brighter than now. That it has many things to contend against is, however, apparent And first we would name the reluctance with which some of those able to communicate information to the public come forward with their pens. The present editor of this journal is an amateur; his position was rather forced upon him than selected by himself, and that occupation, necessary to his position, is still one which he would prefer should be filled by an abler hand. He has, however; an independent position; is no way connected with commercial gardening or nurseries, and he believes he is the first conductor of a periodical devoted entirely to these subjects who has not been more or less influenced by commercial views. He requires assistance from the ablest pens, and though he has much from such sources, there are still experienced amateurs as well as gardeners and nurserymen who should devote a little of their leisure to instructing others as a means of reaching the uninitiated.

It is really surprising what a single individual may perform in the way of getting up a love of the best fruits, flowers, and trees. We could name small communities in the country where to be entirely ignorant of these subjects is to be unfit for society, but in the majority of neighborhoods, the reverse is the rule. In the infancy of the study or pursuit, Societies with competitive exhibitions are necessary, and the longer they can be kept in healthy operation the better. After a certain period, however they are less needed; the seed once sown it must continue to grow.

As for the benighted regions we set out by describing, there seems but little to hope for them in the present generation; but benevolent persons may do much by exciting emulation; above all, let us have something taught to the. children on these topics. What, for instance, would interest a school so thoroughly as a lecture once a year, with plenty of samples of strawberries- - enough for all to partake of; or suppose a teacher as a reward for diligence should produce a table spread with fruit of any kind, and give a short discourse on their culture; if even a waiter of cultivated blackberries were introduced and distributed, with an explanation of the differences between them and the common wild ones, we may be sure the children would never forget it. In this way whole neighborhoods could be filled with young people desirous of trying their hands in better garden culture than their fathers practised; Horticultural Societies which would undertake an annual or semi-annual exhibition to school children, and give them a taste while they instructed them, would make one of the strongest moves in the right direction. It has been tried abroad and has succeeded.

Hazlitt, in one of his Essays, answers the question "Why is a great chess-player not a great man?" by the reply, "Because he leaves the world as he found it." Not so the Agriculturist and Horticulturist; they leave the world better than they found it, if they pursue their avocations with zeal and understanding, and bring a knowledge of its humanizing influences to their neighbors.