STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 345 



pany save their own little band, the twinkling stars, and perchance the 

 moon reflecting the light of the morrow's sun that should still find them 

 pursuing their onward track to these western shores, could have looked 

 his fellow voyager in the face and seriously have said : •' In the march 

 of events, twenty years shall witness the road we now travel over banded 

 with iron " When they were fatigued and discouraged with the slow pro- 

 gress they were making, and when they saw that the great overland 

 schooners, that they had allowed would take them over in safet}', were 

 more fatigued and discouraged than themselves — when the tire says to 

 his felloes : " I can roll you no further over this desert waste," and the 

 felloes replied, " so be it, I am heartily tired of being squeezed," and 

 each spoke set up for itself, leaving the hub no other alternative but 

 to accept the situation ; how little those pioneers thought that tire and 

 felloes, spokes and hubs, were to be the mile posts to mark the path of 

 the great railwa} 7 of to-da} r , that the bows from their wagons were bows 

 of promise of this great, this glorious achievement. They have lived to see 

 the time when they can step into a car, luxurious in all its appointments, 

 and starting from where the Pacific rolls its surges against the western 

 shores of this broad domain, they can, in a week's time, be set down in 

 the great metropolis of this republic, whose feet are laved by the waters 

 of the Atlantic. 



While matter can thus be whirled along, our thoughts, that are the 

 emanations of the spirit that predominates over and directs matter, can 

 be transmitted across the continent from San Francisco to New York in 

 so short a time that space is almost annihilated. As one great thought 

 is but the father of another that may open the way to grand and hidden 

 results, so a/ great project is but the introduction of some other mighty 

 achievement within the almost infinite grasp of man. No sooner do we 

 see the great railway, the longest in the world, in successful operation, 

 than we hear of the project of a telegraph line from San Francisco to 

 Japan, a distance of eight thousand miles. Thus we see one supply 

 makes another demand. We can take the teas of China and Japan from 

 San Francisco to New York in one week; but we are not satisfied with 

 that; we want to be able to ask them in Japan the price of their teas, 

 and to know how much they are going to give us for good Goshen butter. 

 While such mighty projects and achievements are being pushed forward 

 to success, let us turn within ourselves and take a retrospective view of 

 the country and its affairs, and see whether we are forging a link that 

 shall make one in the great chain of progress, and that shall entitle us 

 to the consideration of this progressive age, or whether we shall be left 

 behind in the great race, as old fossils, fit only for the century that has 

 gone before ? 



As we look around this hall to-night, we are pleased to see the effort 

 that has been made by the different exhibitors to make our ninth annual 

 exhibition compare favorably with former years. We have quite a 

 variety of the products of the soil. Wheat, barley, flax seed, turnips, 

 squashes — that might be called some pumpkins, from their size — cucum- 

 bers that have stretched themselves out so that they look more like the 

 subtle animal that tempted Eve than they do like cucumbers; broom 

 corn that looks as though it bad been reaching up to feed upon the dews 

 of heaven, and to look down with quiet disdain upon the common corn by 

 its side ; beets that are beets, that can beat the beet that beat the beaters. 

 Watermelons and muskmelons that make the mouth water to look at. 



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