. Who can estimate the elevating and refining influences and moral value
of flowers with all their graceful forms, bewitching shades, and combinations
of colors and exquisitely varied perfumes? These silent influences are
unconsciously felt even by those who do not appreciate them consciously
and thus with better and still better fruits, nuts, grains, vegetables and
flowers, will the earth be transformed, man's thought refined and turned
from the base destructive forces into nobler production. One which will
lift him too high planes of action toward the happy day when the Creator
of all this beautiful work is more acknowledged and loved, and where man
shall offer his brother man, not bullets and bayonets, but richer grains,
better fruit and fairer flowers from the bounty of this earth.
- Father George Schoener (1864 -1941),
The Importance and Fundamental Principles of Plant Breeding
