134 AGRICULTURE 0E MAINE. 



of butter a year. This is one of the reasons why we receive so 

 small prices for the hay and grain which we have to market, 

 and why we are so poorly paid in our business. 



The law which has been vigorously applied by all men who 

 have improved their animals, has been "the saving of the good 

 and the rejection of the poor." In breeding our dairy stock in 

 New England we have not applied the rule, but we have raised 

 the poor as well as the good, and we can see the results all about 

 us. The Dutchman, the Scotchman, the Jersey and Guernsey 

 men selected the best and rejected the poor. We New England 

 people are conducting our dairy farming under the unfavorable 

 conditions of a cold climate. The long winters during which 

 it is necessary to keep the cows under cover, if we would get the 

 most they are capable of yielding, for the food they eat, are 

 exhaustive of vitality. 



I accept the idea that the digestion of food, the making of 

 blood, and the elaborating of milk, are labor to the cow, as much 

 as the drawing of heavy loads is labor to the ox. We know well 

 that the milch cow requires but little exercise, for the sake of 

 exercise alone, that the less she has of it the more milk she gives, 

 so long as all her organs are normally active. 



Are we assured because of good yields that she is at her best, 

 so far as the future of herself and her offspring is concerned, 

 and her present productions not alone considered? Has the cow 

 become so artificial a creature that she can be shut into rooms 

 that she shall warm with her own body heat, and keep confined 

 there half of the year and still become the mother of other genera- 

 tions of cows capable of repeating the good work that she her- 

 self is doing? Has the world another class of breeders that have 

 ever dared to undertake the work that we are daily practicing 

 with so little fear ? The old native stock that we started with had 

 lived lives of privation and exposure and had developed hardi- 

 hood sufficient to sustain them. We have built warm homes 

 for them and given them lives of luxury in the sunshine admitted 

 through glass windows. We have grafted special purpose blood 

 upon that hardy common stock, and the results are to be seen in 

 our magnificent dairy animals that do only one thing, but do that 

 one thing well. Shall we ever reach, or have we already reached 

 a place in this work when warnings to desist will not be stilled? 

 How long will the strong constitutions that were inherited from 



