DAIRY MEETING. 131 



mothers before her, and she ceased giving milk in the fall, when 

 the green pastures turned brown, and the fetus which she was 

 carrying required for its development all the nourishment which 

 she could extract from her meagre winter rations. 



When the first agricultural depression came to New England, 

 because our markets were cheaply supplied with human food 

 by other states, whose soils yet retained their virgin richness and 

 yielded crops with little labor, we turned our eyes from our beef 

 steers, and mutton and wool producing sheep — the animals that 

 had been the chief source of the income, which was now lost — 

 to the cow, that creature that had been the constant companion 

 of our fathers from the first, and had yielded more food for the 

 nourishment of their families than had any of the other animals 

 they owned although as yet she had been credited with working 

 but half the year. 



This was the creature that the farmer turned to thirty years 

 ago and asked to become his co-worker. She was not an expert 

 worker. She was only just a common cow, — rugged in form and 

 feature and varied in her colorings. She yielded some milk and 

 some beef. As her breeding had been a matter of convenience 

 rather than of care, her offspring varied in form and function 

 as much as she varied from her father and mother. She 

 belonged to no family, she had no breeding, but in one respect 

 she excelled all of the breeds of her race and kind that followed 

 her. She was, in truth, a result of the law of the "survival of 

 the fittest." She had lived with our fathers through all their 

 generations, from the time when they built their first little cabins 

 in the clearings down until we remember her. Whatever they 

 suffered and endured she suffered and endured, and she, as well 

 as they, developed such vitality, stamina, and hardihood, which 

 we call constitution, as no race of animals or men, since them, 

 have been blessed with. 



We older men who are in this meeting today, took this cow 

 when we were boys, thirty odd years ago, and we have wrought 

 a mighty change in her since then, and she, in her turn, has had 

 as much as we to do in bringing back fertility to worn New 

 England soils and giving us again a prosperous and hopeful 

 agriculture. Protected from cold and storms and with more 

 and better food, she recognized the care of her master, and in her 

 turn gave him more milk. Half a century of this better treat- 



