THE ANNUAL MEETING. 145 



force, the individual character with the power of transmitting it, that makes 

 the blooded stock in their stables so valuable. Men laugh at the idea of pedi- 

 gree seed. An agricultural paper of national reputation, which gives column 

 after column to the record and discussion of the pedigrees of stock, met with a 

 column of editorial ridicule at the idea of pedigree seed when presented by an 

 eastern writer. And when one of the professors in our agricultural college 

 presented the subject and spoke of some of the ways in which seeds could be 

 improved by breeding, a local but influential paper, that boasts of its scien- 

 tific and practical ability, saw fit to remark that if the professors of the college 

 could not find anything of more practical importance to the farmers of the 

 State than breeding seed, they had better give place to some one that could. 

 And i doubtless expressed the opinion of thousands of well-informed people 

 who have given the subject but little thought. Let us look at the case a mo- 

 ment. We value our blooded stock not because they are individually worth so 

 much more for meat, but because of the improvement we expect to find in 

 their descendants, as so well is this recognized that if some patron of agricult- 

 ure should bring into the State a bull whose descendants might bo expected to 

 be 20 per cent more valuable for beef than the common stock, there is not an 

 agricultural paper published here but what would notice it. His bovine majesty 

 would be v sited by reporter after reporter, and his master noted far and near 

 as the owner of the wonderful beast. Yet at the end of five years his possible 

 descendants would not exceed 1,000, valued possibly for beef at $75,000 (and it 

 is only their value for beef or other ultimate ends of their production that is to 

 be considered), and if 20 per cent of this value was due to him, it would make 

 his money value to the State $15,000. Now there can be no question but that 

 it is as easy to find some improved variety of grain, like Blont's corn or Claw- 

 son wheat, which will under the same culture out-yield the common 20 per 

 cent, as it is to find an animal whose descendants, under the same care and 

 with the same amount of feed, will out-weigh the common stock at the sham- 

 bles. But if in some corner of a Washtenaw county farm there was a single 

 stalk of corn which, by a systematic course of selection and breeding, had had 

 its characteristics so fixeu that it was capable of increasing the productiveness 

 of its descendants 20 per cent, no one would think it worthy of notice. I 

 doubt if there are a dozen men here who would go a mile to see it. The mat- 

 ter would not be thought worthy of the thinnest kind of a local, even in your 

 town papers, and yet if the descendants of this plant were as carefully increased 

 and preserved as were those of the bull, they would amount at the end of even 

 the third year to 1,000,000 bushels of ear corn, valued at $25,000, and if 20 per 

 cent of this was due to the improved seed, we would have $50,000 against 

 the $15,000 of the much-lauded bull. Again, our State Agricultural Society 

 holds a great annual fair, at which they offer thousands of dollars in premi- 

 ums, and to attend which the farmers of the State expend thousands more, 

 besides taking time at the very busiest season of all the year; and for what 

 object? They tell us that these fairs are worth many times what they cost in 

 the encouragement they give to the improvement of the quality of farm prod- 

 ucts ; that the premiums and accompanying honors are given as a reward for 

 the time and care taken in producing the better animals and grains. Let us 

 look at this premium list. We find that in 1880 the society offered premiums 

 for cattle amounting in the aggregate to about $4,000 ; for wheat, including 

 flour, premiums, amounting to $04 ; for corn and meal about $40. Now, bear- 

 ing in mind the professed object of the society, and the fact that the profitable 

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