The Evolution of Dairying. 



By .Tared Van Waoenkn, Jk., Lawyersville, N. Y. 

 Delivered at the meeting of the New York State Dairymen's Association at Watertovvn. 



If we should try to point* out any single watchword which 

 might be said to represent the dominant thought, the most promi- 

 nent philosophy of the last half of this century, that watchword 

 would be evolution. And the term evolution does not mean that 

 man by some mysterious sort of a breeding-up process was derived 

 from a monkey or a tailless ape. That is the most common, most 

 crude and, I think I may say, most vulgar conception of a great 

 physical and spiritual truth. But in its broader sense it means, 

 not only that so far as organic nature is concerned do we stand in 

 the presence of a constantly changing and, therefore, unfinished 

 creation, but it means also that what is true of vegetable cell and 

 towering tree, of bird and beast and creeping thing, of lurking 

 savage and civilized man is true as well of art and science and 

 religion and society, true also of all the physical, moral and spirit- 

 ual forces of the world. And evolution means too, that we have 

 come to see more plainly the hoary truth that everywhere, in the 

 realm of nature and in the realm of social and commercial activi- 

 ties, there is being waged the fiercest of battles — the never-ending 

 struggle for existence — and that out of this conflict there is being 

 evolved the most perfect adaptability because the whole struggle 

 tends only to one end — the survival of the most fit. To-day men 

 use the philosophy of evolution to explain almost everything. 

 They trace, with breaks perhaps and many surmises, the tiny 

 simple animal cell up through long ages in many forms until it 

 blossoms into the highest of animal life. They trace society, from 

 the half brute man roaming wild in the forest or hiding in the 

 grass, up to the time when the idea of the family first came in and 

 children bore their mothers name becauso there was no means by 

 which their fathers should be known ; so on up through the clan 

 and the tribe and the feudal baroncy and the nation and all the 

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