STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 103 



OPENING ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT LARUE. 



At the Pavilion, Tuesday Evening, September 9th, 1879. 



Officers and Members of the State Agricultural Society, 

 Ladies, and Gentlemen: In accordance with a long established 

 custom, it becomes my pleasant duty to extend to you here, on behalf 

 of the State Agricultural Society of California, a welcome, on this its 

 twenty-sixth annual exhibition. In extending to you this formal 

 greeting, permit me to congratulate you upon the success of the 

 Society and the bright auspices under which this exhibition has 

 opened. If to-night we were to institute a comparison between the 

 exhibition now in progress and some of the twenty-five which have 

 preceded it, we would find in some of the elements which constitute 

 a successful exhibition the merit of superiority to belong to the 

 exhibitions of other years, while in other respects we would find 

 gratifying evidences that in many departments of agricultural and 

 mechanical industry great progress has been made among our people, 

 while in many important respects the exhibition now opening is 

 superior to any that have preceded it. In the vicissitudes of indus- 

 try there will be fluctuations from year to year, and these will be 

 reflected in this annual exhibition, but they are merely superficial 

 and transient. The great underlying objects of the Society are being 

 steadily accomplished. Thirty years ago a number of people suffi- 

 cient to populate a State immigrated here in one year. They found 

 a new and a strange world. They found soils differing in every 

 respect from those with which they had been familiar. They found 

 a climate as new and strange to them as if the stories of a fairy land 

 had become a sudden reality. The object of their coming was to 

 search for gold. To these comers the plains and valleys of Califor- 

 nia were brown and barren deserts. To their eyes the mountains 

 gave no other promise than the hiding places of precious metals. 

 Gradually the capabilities of the soils and this climate, for the pur- 

 poses of agriculture, began to be suspected. But the discovery was 

 early made that the knowledge and skill acquired in other lands, 

 under other climates and other conditions, were not applicable to 

 this country; that the farmer must learn anew the science of agri- 

 culture if he would be successful here. The experience of other 

 States, which had been fully justified, and which had found its way 

 into the standard literature of the science of agriculture, could not 

 be availed of to guide and direct the agriculturist in California. 

 The science must be formed anew, almost from the very beginning. 

 To accomplish this, the most extended observation and inquiry and 

 comparison of experiment was necessary, and it was to facilitate 

 the accomplishment of these necessary things that the State Agricul- 

 tural Society was organized and these annual exhibitions were pro- 

 jected. It is intelligence that develops the resources of any country. 



