110 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan , 



SECOND DAY. 



The convention met at 9.30 o'clock. 



The Secretary. I have the pleasure of introducing to 

 you my neighbor, Mr. Goodwin, a practical, a successful 

 farmer, who, while making his lands yield him their annual 

 tribute is even more solicitous to keep up their capacity 

 for future production, that this sacred soil trust may be 

 transmitted intact to his children in all its original fertility — 

 rather than an exhausted, barren legacy. He will address 

 you on " The relations of Forests to our Climate, and the 

 Evils Resulting from their Waste and Destruction upon Ani- 

 mal and Vegetable Life." 



Mr. Goodwin. I feel somewhat embarrassed at this intro- 

 duction by neighbor Gold, our honored Secretary. I live 

 upon the banks of the Housatonic, and have to contend with 

 those dry, sandy, barren soils once alluded to by Mr. Webster. 

 when some forty years since he appeared before the New 

 York State Agricultural Society at Rochester to deliver their 

 annual address, comparing his own similar acres at Marsh- 

 field with the then more virgin soil of Western New York — 

 yet unlike him I have never been able to overcome their 

 infertility, not having had the purse of Boston millionaires 

 to aid me. Now my friend Gold labors under no such disa- 

 bility. He lives east of me, just over the Crown of the Hill, 

 always in sight from my windows. When old Mother 

 Nature, in those primeval, diluvial times was grinding up the 

 rocks for a soil and scattering them hither and thither with 

 her rushing waters, preparing the earth to become the habi- 

 tation of man, she struck the brow of this hill with her 

 raking, sweeping forces, carrying their creamy deposits over 

 into the valley below, and dumped them just where this man 

 and his ancestors before him had found their domicil— and 

 it has ever since been called the " Cream of the Hills," while 

 we back of and behind him have had to eke out our liveli- 

 hood upon the rocks and from the soils thus sacreligously 



