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when cultivated. The potato was a small, tough, poisonous tuber, until 

 civilized man took it in hand and by cultivation made it farinaceous, escu- 

 lent, and palatable. And so with all your fruits. God made them a little, 

 man has made them a great deal. The very flowers are not perfect until 

 they are taught by man to blush and bourgeon in bewitching and bewilder- 

 ing beauty. The gap between the simple hues of our wild flowers and the 

 gorgeous splendors of our gardens and conservatories was bridged by arti- 

 ficial selection. God only gives the separate colors for such a picture as 

 your gardens reveal, and he leaves it to your taste to combine them into a 

 thing of beauty and a joy forever — to paint the lily and add a perfume to 

 the violet. Wild sheep have coarse hair, like goats, and the horse undo- 

 mesticated and in his natural state, was of the mustang type and size. 

 God gave a hint, a suggestion of a horse, and behold! man evolves the 

 magnificent thoroughbred, as sensitive as a lady and as finely organized 

 as a humming bird, whose neck is clothed with thunder, and under whose 

 spurning feet the road rushes like some mountain torrent hastening to the 

 sea. We admire the work of a Rosa Bonheur who could paint bulls so 

 lifelike that you dare not flourish a red bandana in their presence, and 

 horses that like Job's war horse seemed to show by their red nostrils' play, 

 that they heard afar the noise of the captains and the shouting. We 

 admire a Landseer's great animal studies. But you have the original 

 pictures — these are but copies. How much nobler as an achievement to 

 put upon the landscape a massive Clydesdale, or Percheron, or Old Glory, 

 or an Alderney calf with eyes as soft as a gazelle's, or a Devon, or a Dur- 

 ham, ruminating in dumb dignity! Some of you here have abolished 

 whole tribes and types of poor stock, and that is a grander achievement 

 than to paint a thousand pictures. Who would make such rubbish as 

 rhymes when he can make a strawberry ? How much nobler to put 

 strength and beauty into a horse than to put a blundering idea into a 

 book! How much better to annex fifty acres to the under side of your 

 farm by deep plowing, than to annex an empire! Every acre of opulent 

 swamp and bounteous tule from which coarse grasses are banished, and 

 frogs, snakes, turtles, and mudhens driven, is really so much land created, 

 and so is it creation when fifty acres is made as productive by deep plowing 

 and fertilizing as one hundred is by "scratchiculture." And I want to 

 say here that California farmers seem to have but imperfectly learned the 

 aphorism "Feed the land and it will feed you." You remember how 

 Victor Hugo in "Les Miserables" tells the Parisians that the sewerage of 

 the great sewer of Paris would feed all Paris if used as a fertilizer instead 

 of being carried to the Seine and to the sea? Japan is about as large as 

 England and Ireland, and only half of it is fit for tillage. It has a larger 

 population than Great Britain and Ireland. And yet while England im- 

 ports food annually at a cost of millions of pounds, Japan exports grain 

 every year. They have kept up the soil by using every available fertilizer 

 in the kingdom through ages that stretch back to the time of Moses, 

 whereas the soil of California, rich as it is, will not stand our present cut- 

 throat system of agriculture one hundred years. One half of the twelve 

 million acres of New York State have been almost ruined by "skinners" 

 who take everything from the soil and give nothing back. A great deal of 

 farming land in the Eastern States has been exhausted and the farmers 

 have come West. But, farmers of the Pacific Coast, there is no West for 

 you! Our large farms and our continuous cropping without rotation, 

 especially where we have no winter nor snow to rest, fallow, and mellow 

 the soil, and our almost universal neglect of fertilizers, is, it seems to me, 

 the threefold peril to our agricultural future. Your cattle have mouths 



