SAGADAHOC COUNTY SOCIETY. 115 



autumnal months of each year, especially in the free States, are 

 doing a good service for this essential interest and are turning the 

 attention of the country more and more each passing year to its 

 vast importance. It has now been a little over five years since the 

 organization of the Sagadahoc Agricultural Society, and its fifth 

 yearly exhibition is about drawing to a close. As you have thus 

 year after year driven up your best samples of farm stock, and laid 

 the best products of a generous soil and a patient industry before 

 the public eye for inspection none can have failed to notice from 

 the first a steady improvement in all the leading features of the 

 exhibitions. The most careless and indifferent must admit that 

 this annual, public display of the capacity of our soil and climate, 

 and the skill of our farmers are having a most salutary effect on 

 the agriculture of this vicinity. I mean agriculture in its largest 

 sense, including horticulture, pomology, poultry and stock raising 

 and the dairy. The mechanical and artistical departments, needle 

 work, bread making, and other branches of the house-wife skill, to 

 which I should be glad to give more than a passing allusion did 

 time permit, add much to the interest of these occasions. 



These exhibitions are so full of instruction, so full of gratifying 

 and profitable results, that all who come within the territorial limits 

 of this Society, young and old, men and women, should see to it 

 that the interest in them does not abate, but that at, or near the 

 return of each harvest moon, as the departing year prepares its 

 shroud of beautifully tinted leaves and makes ready to lie down 

 with its hoary companions in the past, lulled to rest by the requiem 

 of autumnal winds, a still more choice collection is brought to- 

 gether, culled from the storehouses of nature and art, and a still 

 wider interest awakened to all branches of industry here repre- 

 sented. A walk through this building and these fair grounds on 

 exhibition days teaches us a useful lesson. The most thoughtless 

 may be forcibly impressed with our complete dependence on our 

 mother earth for all the necessaries, comforts and luxuries of life, 

 and with what ought to be our true position on earth and in rela- 

 tion to each other. Although we here see that earth is a generous 

 and bountiful mother, and can supply all our real wants with a 

 liberal hand, we can also see that a tax is imposed by the God of 

 Nature on all who would enjoy her bounties. She has formed rich 

 ores and minerals in the earth, placed fish in the sea, given to seeds 

 the germinating principle, to soils their life nourishing power — in 

 short, she has given to man control over the vegetable, animal and 



