State Agricultural Society. 203 



is a positive bar to successful husbandry. Hence such lands either lie 

 entirely waste or are claimed and occupied by people who erect a cabin, 

 milk a cow or a goat once a day, plant a patch of corn and squashes to 

 be shared in common by an equal number of squalid urchins and grunt- 

 ing specimens of embryo bacon; raise a few chickens to supply omelets 

 and egg-nogs, and an occasional four-legged calf with which to grace the 

 return of a prodigal two-legged one, and a donkey or a mule to pack a 

 grist to mill and his owner to town on election day to hear the news 

 once a year. 



In such a state of things there is absolutely no demand, no use for 

 good stock, and very little for any sort. But build and stock and work 

 a good railroad through such a district of country, and you have com- 

 paratively brought the metropolis, with its ever increasing demands 

 and upward tending prices and cash payments, to every door. Now, 

 these waste places are called upon for holiday poultry and breakfast 

 steaks and dinner roasts, and vegetables and fruits to the extent they 

 have never dreamed of; and under the influence they awake to the pro- 

 priety and profit of enlarging their operations, cultivating their lands and 

 securing to themselves some of the good things of this life as they pass 

 through it. Now, their butter and their cheese, their bacon and their 

 beef, find buyers at their own doors. Now, the price of grain at the depot 

 warrants the running of a score of gang plows, calling for half a hun- 

 dred pairs of animals. And the farmer, thus waked up by the loco- 

 motive whistle, will not be slow to observe the advantage of blooded 

 Devon steers at the plow, whose elevated heads and elastic step and all 

 day endurance give him a hundred per cent more work than the best of 

 scrubs, while it actually costs him less to keep and manage them; and of 

 blooded horses, whose action and bottom give him twice the distance in 

 an hour, whether at the plow or on the road, that he can safely get 

 from the slow molded, quickly exhausted, common horse of the country. 



And now how changed the scene! The donkey, between the splint- 

 ered shafts of his rickety cart, gives place to a pair of roadsters and a 

 phaston; the broad expanse, grimmed with gastly desolation, becomes a 

 fertile plain, waving with a golden harvest; plows and harrows and 

 reapers and mowers and thrashers and cleaners, each in season, and in its 

 place, adds life to the view and zest to the scene, until the whole year 

 becomes a gala day of active, exciting, productive industry. The farmer, 

 no longer a drudge and a drone, perches himself upon the elevated seat 

 of his improved implements and with absolute comfort rides through the 

 work of the year. 



And of stock, if any land on earth can produce good stock, it is this. 



I know it has been said of sheep that the finer grades deteriorate, 

 grow coarser here. But our Flints and McConnells and Websters have 

 demonstrated the error of this, and now show us specimens of the sixth 

 and eighth generations, actual improvements upon the imported parents. 

 Surely our AValshes, Emersons, Swezys, Eoses, and Youngers have 

 shown us that the noble Durham here attains a size and form equal to 

 the best in the world, and the elegant Devon color, and symmetry, and 

 power, and endurance in the yoke second to none, while the magnificent 

 Alderneys fill longer buckets and require larger churns and more pow- 

 erful presses than in any other land on earth. 



I also beg to call attention to a new California invention for the making 

 and refining of brandies from the grape in so brief a time and in such a 

 state of perfection as to render this important department remunerative, 

 instead of ruinous, as it has heretofore been. There is already a large 



