6 BOAED OF AGRICULTURE. 



That the record of this department during the past twenty 

 years of its existence has been alike honorable and useful to 

 the Commonwealth, no one who has any intelligence of its 

 operations and the service it has rendered to the farming 

 community, can, for a moment, entertain a reasonable doubt. 

 It has awakened a .wide-spread spirit of inquiry and a desire 

 for improvement never known before ; it has collected and 

 distributed a vast body of information which has come to 

 be appreciated and universally sought for, and has issued 

 twenty volumes of Reports, which are everywhere admitted 

 to bear comparison with the best Reports of the kind pub- 

 lished in the country. 



But if it had done nothing else for the State and the coun- 

 try beside the complete extirpation of that dreadful scourge 

 to agriculture, wherever it exists, the contagious pleuro- 

 pneumonia, it would have paid all the expense of its organi- 

 zation many times over. That the farmers of this Common- 

 wealth are not to-day suffering from the constant dread and 

 the actual visitation of this worst of all forms of contagious 

 diseases among cattle, because the most insidious, is due 

 almost wholly to the existence and persistent efforts of the 

 Board at the time of its outbreak in 1859 and subsequent 

 years. And if it had not been for such efforts, we should 

 now be subjected to a loss of many thousand dollars a year, 

 with no reasonable hope of permanent relief from a tax upon 

 our resources and our patience, the most severe and most 

 difficult to be borne of any that could be imposed upon an 

 agricultural community. The present existence and terrible 

 ravages of this disease in England and other civilized coun- 

 tries where it has become a fixture, causing immense losses 

 every year, and increasing the hazards of stock- farming many 

 fold, is a sufficient proof of the truth of this assertion. And 

 we believe it is not too much to sav that England would most 

 gladly pay an amount equal to the whole aggregate cost of 

 our State Board, including all the cost of printing and the 

 bounties to our agricultural societies, for the last twenty 

 years, to purchase exemption from this unmitigated scourge. 



The rapid growth of cities and manufacturing villages has led 

 to some change in the chief productions of the farm, and the 

 attention of cultivators has been turned largely to supply the 



