SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 187 



of a cultivated landscape, in motion and in repose. And man 

 never succeeds in subduing the earth and revealing its quiet 

 domestic beauty, until he has enlisted those servants, without whose 

 aid agriculture must fail, and whose value is commensurate with 

 the progress made in the great business of applying all animate 

 and inanimate nature to the necessities and adornments of civilized 

 life. 



Lecture by Henry Boynton, M. D., of Woodstock, Vt., on 



V Sheep Husbandry ik New England. 



3Ir. President and Gentlemen of the Conveyition ■' — I congratulate 

 myself upon the singular good fortune that enables me to share 

 with you the rejoicings and the benefits of this occasion. 



The mental vibration, resulting from the thought that originated 

 this Convention, reached me in my home among the mountains, and 

 with willing feet have I hastened to join you in this Feast of the 

 Tabernacles — this Jubilee after the harvest. 



And, Gentlemen, I count it an honor to meet in council with 

 those, by whose intelligent foresight and patient industry your 

 State has been placed, as regards its agriculture, in the very front 

 rank of all the States in the nation. The influence of this move- 

 ment for a Farmer's Convention", is already widely felt, and to-day 

 the dwellers along the Green Mountain valleys send through me 

 their words of greeting and of good cheer, well knowing as they 

 do, that neither the science or the art of agriculture will ever be 

 allowed to suffer at the hands of that commonwealth which in all 

 matters pertaining to the civil, political, or military history of our 

 common country, has ever proved herself a faithful and watchful 

 sentinel on this northeastern bastion of the great structure of the 

 American Republic. 



We meet to consult in regard to the condition and the needs of 

 the various branches of that calling which is at once th^ most 

 difficult and the most sublime of all the employments of man. 



When we remember that the interests of the human race repose 

 upon agriculture, and that agriculture reposes upon fixed and 

 invariable laws, do we see the deeper science — the nobler dignity 

 —and the immense responsibility of our work. 



We are frequently reminded of the light which science has within 

 the past few years thrown upon the farmer's duties and office — and 

 as frequently are we pointed to the magnificent results which this 

 new light has enabled us to achieve — but these results as grand 



