Irish potato as in the most gorgeous dahlia ever exhibited.  Not one farmer in a thousand has ever read the history of that root of roots, in value to mankind; has ever conceived what a tasteless, contracted, water-soaked thing it was in its wild and original condition.  Let them read a few chapters of the early history of New England, and they will see what it was two hundred and fifty years ago, when the strong-hearted men and women, whom Hooker led to the banks of the Connecticut, sought for it in the white woods of winter, scraping away the snow with their frosted fingers.  The largest they found just equalled the Malaga grape in size and resembled it in complexion.  They called it the ground-nut, for it seemed akin to the nuts dropped by the oaks of different names.  No flower that breathes on earth has been made to produce so many varieties of form, complexion, and name as this homely root.  It would be an interesting and instructive enterprise, to array all the varieties of this queen of esculent vegetables which Europe and America could exhibit, face to face with all the varieties which the dahlia, geranium, pansy, or even the fern has produced, and then see which has been numerically the most prolific in diversification of forms and features.  It should gratify a better motive than curiosity to trace back the history of other roots to their aboriginal condition.  Types of the original stock may now be found, in waste places, in the wild turnip, wild carrot, parsnip, etc.  “Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little,” it may be truly and gratefully said, these roots, internetted with the very life-fibres of human sustenance, have been brought to their present perfection and value.  The great governments and peoples of the world should give admiring and grateful thought to this fact.  Here nature co-works with the most common and inartistic of human industries, as they are generally held, with faculties as subtle and beautiful as those which she brings to bear upon the choicest flowers.  The same is true of grains and grasses for man and beast.  They come down to us from a kind of heathen parentage, receiving new forms and qualities from age to age.  The wheats, which make the bread of all the continents, now exhibit varieties which no one has undertaken to enumerate.  Fruits follow the same rule, and show the same joint-working of Nature and Art as in the realm of flowers.

The wheel within wheel, the circle within circle expand and ascend until the last circumferential line sweeps around all the world of created being, even taking in, upon the common radius, the highest and oldest of the angels.  From the primrose peering from the hedge to the premier seraph wearing the coronet of his sublime companionship; from the lowest forms of vegetable existence to the loftiest reaches of moral nature this side of the Infinite, this everlasting law of co-working rules the ratio of progress and